Did you play and love Diablo or Diablo II back in the day? Do you wish there was a modern equivalent?  If so, you can stop reading now and head over to steampowered.com. Buy yourself a copy of Torchlight for $20, and you’ll be in action rpg nirvana within a half hour or so.

The same principle applies if you played Fate some years ago – Torchlight is by some of the same folks and if you like Fate, you’re going to love Torchlight – it’s Fate on steroids with a shiny new coat of paint.

If you’re not familiar with these games, they’re easy to pick up and play, feature some light’ish rpg elements, tons of variety in setting, enemies, and most especially loot. You run around doing simple quests, fighting bad guys, leveling up, gathering up swords of +5 smacking of goodness, lather, rinse, repeat. They don’t necessarily require much heavy thinking but there are tactics that work and those that don’t, with plenty of health potions required for those who don’t want to bother thinking and just want to plow ever deeper into the dungeon.

I love the genre and this is the best example of it to come along in years. There’s a video below so you can get a sense of the gameplay. For now this is PC only but there’s a Mac version on the way due in January. For now you can only buy this via the digital download services but a boxed version is also on the way. There are also development tools on the way and the game is very Mod friendly. If this does as well as Fate did, expect tons of additional content, conversions, and more.

My only criticisms of the game are that I wish the loading was a bit faster and I wish they had included multiplayer, but man, it’s $20 and it’s a blast to play. Definitely worth checking out if it seems like it’s up your alley.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/ghQBj6Gfn10&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0

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