I recently purchased Torchlight II off a Steam sale and really enjoy it. A friend of mine had recommended it to me, saying it was created by the old team that did the first two Diablo games.
I’m a big fan of the Diablo franchise, and had kind of a love/hate relationship with the third game. One one hand, they implemented a lot of things that helped make the game a bit faster-paced (health orbs, free town portal/identify) and some things were a straight up improvement (being able to remove gems, encouraging use of low-level gems in equipment vs hoarding them to turn them into big gems later).
Unfortunately it experimented with a few other gameplay elements that I think backfired. For instance, in Diablo III, each character gains a ‘main’ skill, and a half dozen ‘subskills’ that modify the main skill. This is a neat concept; I’m not knocking it- its just they were too generous: You can customize your loadout, and respec any time you want. At first this might sound really neat, but the downside is that once you max out a character, there’s really no incentive to start a new character of the same type. You can always change builds at any time, so there’s zero risk with trying something, making me feel less invested in my character. Like in World of Warcraft, your character’s skill point gain is fixed based on class/level and you have no input, restricting flexibility and limiting stat changes to gear (which forces you to farm for better gear) Each class has its own resource, which is creative (Rage, Spirit, Arcane Energy, Mana, Discipline/etc) but gets tricky to balance when they all have their own gimmicky mechanics- A monk builds spirit by punching things, but there are many situations where you can get one-hit KOed very easy, and if you run out of spirit you are kind of screwed (also it doesn’t refresh when you die :mad: ). Some Monk and Barbarian builds never bothered using abilities that consumed their resource because the mechanic ended up being a liability, rather than an edge, at higher difficulties.
Contrasted to this is Torchlight II, which I think takes a lot of what made Diablo II great. I feel like its like playing Diablo 2.5; its not too ‘same-y’ as D2 yet not so far ‘out there’ like Diablo III. Anecdotally, I’ve heard people say Torchlight II is what they wished Diablo III would’ve been 
While the characters don’t crack the witty one-liners like in D3, there’s nothing like playing whack-a-mole with a Steampunk-style engineer armed with a giant fire belching monkey wrench 