Leave the Torchlight on...

I was able to acquire a new game recently: Torchlight. [official site] [wiki]
I had heard some buzz about it and was intrigued. It's an RPG by Runic Games, and partially designed by guys who worked on Diablo I & II.
To be honest the only way I can sum up the description is the same as everyone else: a single-player World of Warcraft as done in the Diablo engine.

It's an RPG, with randomly generated dungeons a la Diablo. There's 1 town to come back to. All the standard features are there (even the Town Portal spell and Identify scrolls). You can choose from 3 player types: melee DPS, ranged DPS, or spellcaster (mana-based ranged DPSer). Isometric view you can't rotate. Five points to distribute to Str/Dex/Magic/Defense per level.

The weapon names and art style are very WoW-like: that slightly cartoonish, colorful, "fat" look. Quest givers have the familiar yellow "?" from WoW, and when you take/complete a quest you're informed on the sidebar of how much Gold, XP, and items you'll receive. There are also 'talent trees' to customize your character's abilities (+1 point per level to distribute, and +1 point every time you level up your Fame rating). Inventory is done the WoW way: one item per slot (so no playing Tetris in the inventory bag). Even your gear has sockets to fit gems into. Boss fights every couple of dungeon levels.

A neat thing is that you always have a pet: you choose a cat or a dog when you create the character. The dog looks like a husky or grey wolf, and the cat looks like a small tiger/lynx in yellow-orange. That pet fights alongside you, has a pack that can carry as many items as you can, AND you can send him off to run back to town to sell off whatever is in his bag. That saves some trips back & forth from town.

The game is gorgeous and supports my 1600x900 rez, but it's not overly complicated in the gfx department so it would run beautifully on a lesser computer (like my laptop I surmise).

One major thing I like about Torchlight is that it's an RPG, but has difficulty levels. So I put mine on Easy because I just want to romp thru the dungeons and experience the content and have fun and not die... ^_^

I chose to play The Alchmist. Yep, the spellcaster. He's like a mix of mage & steampunk styles. Staff or wand in hand, big mechanical glove on the other hand, plus goggles. Love my goggles. I named him spontaneously, a variation of 'rascal' -- Raz Kal. I think that might be my new game characters' names. I named my pet cat Tigre (that's French for tiger, always made me think of a little kitty tiger).
So far I'm like level 10-ish, I can fire off 3 bolts of energy at once, a chain blast of lightning, and summon up to 3 permanent Imps to fight with me, and a small horde of zombies for a minute at a time (yes, I've taken the Warlock route a la my WoW character). >:-]

It IS only single-player, as the development time was under a year I think I had read. In another year or two they are planning on releasing an MMORPG based on this. If so, I definitely would look into it.

Check it out, it's $20 to download from the official website, else there's definitely something from TPB...