Dungeon crawler role playing games. The genre name can evoke many feelings: tedium from the endless grind, fear of the mandatory giant spiders, excitement while wondering what’s right around the bend. The name on most people’s lips right now is Diablo III; and in the frantic rush of its opening week many might have overlooked Torchlight II beta, which closed on May 24th. I had the opportunity to play through the open areas of the game and hit the cap before it closed, so I'll be breaking down my experience, piece by piece, to show you how Torchlight stands up against its stiff competition – read on for more!

I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad that Runic Games has just announced that Torchlight II will not be released in 2011. On one hand, we've all been looking forward to playing Torchlight II, and when ZAM's Director of Content, Cody Bye got some hands-on time with the game, he only had good things to say about the game, but on the other hand, Q3 and Q4 of 2012 has been something of a tsunami of quality game releases.

Regardless, Runic Games really wants Torchlight II to shine, and they're saying that "getting a game of this scope up to the quality and polish level we want to achieve is going to take a little longer." The team is also hoping to squeeze in a small beta test before launch, if just to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. All of this means that Torchlight II will be delayed at least into 2012, although no real date has been set for anything beyond that. At least this means I won't have to cancel all my sleep. Until 2012, that is.