Torchlight II boasts a large portion of the team that worked on the Diablo games, so for starters, it has pretty similar and cool music and sound effects. The controls are very intuitive, much more so than those of Diablo III; playing Diablo III and Torchlight II one after the other makes me appreciate the latter's controls all the more. However, this game feels pretty mindless. I don't like many spells on the skill tree and seem to be able to blow through everything with one skill for the most part. The quests do at least seem to be a lot more original than those of Torchlight. The Act 2 area also reminds me of the desert from Fable 3; good memories there. The terrain is confusing: though it's wonderfully mapped for collisions, it can be hard to tell when you don't have a straight shot at an enemy and I have wasted a lot of mana trying to hit things that I thought I'd be able to. A minor irritant is that the gems take up as much space as every other inventory item and thus inundate my stash very quickly, but altogether, this game is enjoyable enough to play through once. I wouldn't make more than my one character, though; the replay value isn't very high.
Also, whether it be in Diablo, Torchlight, or Hero Siege, Act 2 is always a desert.