I try to show off my pants to other players in the beta, but they never seem to want to stick around). (Although saying that, right now one of my characters has the most astounding pair of mechanical pants that I can't ever imagine trading in. Every other monster is a self-propelled piñata just waiting to gift you gold, a shinier shield, a deadlier dagger or a slightly sleeker pair of pants. The game does one thing and it does that one thing very well indeed - that thing being hurling stuff at you to slaughter, carefully metering this carnage with rewards of commensurate size. Playing Torchlight 2 is like being drip-fed a powerful, soothing and hypnotic drug in ever-greater quantities. And I never want it to, either, until I glance at the clock and, once again, see how many more hours of my life I've lost. All the stats increase, the body counts rise, the monsters enlarge, the percentages double and the sheer magnitude of the powers at my fingertips is only matched by the volume of the things I have to fight. I hope that's not my own voice I sometimes hear cackling. I feel like Caligula with a carving knife. I must've pressed the wrong button somewhere, selected the wrong option, because every time I step into the Torchlight 2 beta my experience is less akin to a game and more like an orgy of destruction, spiralling further and further out of my control until everything becomes a bloody mist of damage numbers and body parts.

Torchlight ii