Torchlight Infinite Reviews

Torchlight Infinite is the latest installment of a much-loved series of dungeon-crawling, loot-hoarding action-RPGs. Today marks the start of the open beta, which will remain running until the full launch of the game, with all character and account progress carrying forward.

THE STORY

Set hundreds of years after the numbered Torchlight games, Infinite doesn’t require advanced knowledge of those past titles. Players select one of the five named heroes (with more promised in the future), each with their own unique class and playstyle. Then they journey out into a world where powerful Ember Tech has helped build up a wildly advanced civilization and culture…right up until said Ember begins being corrupted by dark forces and unleashing monsters into the cities, forests, and mountains of the land of Leptis.

PLATFORMS

Torchlight Infinite’s open beta is available on Android, iOS, and PC. For this round, I primarily played on PC.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve logged around eight to ten hours with Torchlight Infinite over the past few days. That’s enough that my character (the Berserker Rehan) is nearing level 30, and I’m almost finished with the second story chapter of three that are available in the open beta. The game will feature five story chapters total for its full launch and sports a current level cap of 99.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• The feel. Torchlight Infinite runs smooth as butter on PC, and it provides exactly what I’m looking for in any good action-RPG: the utter satisfaction of being able to rain a flurry of impressively destructive blows on giant packs of enemies with just a few taps of my keyboard or right mouse button.

• The loot. Enemies in Torchlight Infinite drop goodies at an astounding rate right from the get-go. While a lot of that gear inevitably turns out to be vendor trash, I feel like I’ve had a constant sense of slowly increasing my power and regularly finding replacements for each armor slot.

• The progression. From talent trees to skill nodes to pact spirits, Torchlight Infinite provides an awful lot of routes for powering up your hero. More impressively, even when the number-juggling gets a little out of hand, each of these avenues for progression came across as meaningful and relevant, and I’ve enjoyed playing around with different build ideas—especially as compared to the extremely toned-down and minimized character development choices of Diablo Immortal.

• Season-exclusive gameplay mechanics. Though Torchlight Infinite is only in open beta, it’s already in the midst of the first season of what will hopefully be many to come. This comes with the requisite battle pass, but it also includes something unique and quite engaging: special gameplay systems that are seemingly only meant to be around for this season. For season one, those mechanics are focused on absorbing evil energy from monsters around a map, then purging that enemy to spawn dozens of powerful enemies at once. Tackling those challenges builds up resources for “Corrosion Crafting,” a new way to power up gear that is exclusive to this season.

WHAT SUCKS

• The story. To be fair, the Torchlight games have never had particularly engaging narratives, and story isn’t the main draw of an action-RPG anyway. Even so, I was barely able to follow what was going on here, and while I met a few characters I kind of liked, I struggled to stay interested during cutscenes.

• The bugs. While Torchlight Infinite is relatively stable in its open beta form, I did run into a few bizarre problems during my playtime. I experienced one crash, several instances of enemy models freaking out and stretching across the screen in strange ways, and most annoying, multiple occasions where I found myself under attack by completely invisible enemies.

• Possibly the microtransactions. Torchlight Infinite made headlines this summer for boldly proclaiming that it would not suffer from the same pay-to-win nonsense and hidden progress walls of Diablo Immortal. Unfortunately, the game has gone back on some of those promises. For example, there is now a seasonal battle pass, and players have quickly discovered that despite promises, the game features a way to exchange money for player power via the gacha-style pactspirit system. Since Torchlight Infinite has no player-versus-player, this issue doesn’t feel as damning as it did with Diablo Immortal, but it could cause problems as players progress into endgame content.

SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?

Yes, definitely. It’s too early to speak to the long-term potential of Torchlight Infinite as a game that players return to over and over again for years, but even if that doesn’t pan out, it’s crammed with dozens of hours of fast-paced, polished action-RPG fun for no cost. It’s worth the download, for sure.