Runic Games was formed in 2008 essentially as a way to keep together the team that created the now-defunct MMO Mythos. As you may recall, Mythos itself was an iteration on Diablo's gameplay, but in a massive, shared world context. It was a beautiful baby, but unfortunately Flagship Studios shuttered its doors and dashed the hopes of Mythos's beta testers.

However, knowing a good thing when they saw it, Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer, the co-founders of Blizzard North; and Travis Baldree, maker of Fate (itself very Diabloesque) snatched up the entire dev team behind Mythos and brought them on board. They saw the large need that Mythos and Fate fulfilled and with an announcement in December of the same year, brought the world's attention to Torchlight.

With its release right around the corner, I was given an all-too-brief look at Torchlight recently, and I can tell you without a doubt that it's my most-anticipated game this year. Here's what I saw:

First of all, anyone who loved Mythos will love Torchlight. The gameplay is very nearly identical, as you might expect considering who's behind it. Apparently they threw this thing together in about 11 months, which, if you know anything about game development, is sheer crazygonuts. At the same time, however, the dev team built their own underlying engine, rather than remain with the one that was used to make Hellgate: London. The difference shows -- there is no stutter, no lag, the framerates are smooth as butter. Gosh, it's almost as if the team went ahead and fixed everything that was wrong in Mythos!

The mechanics are as you remember: click on a monster to attack it; right-click to use special abilities. There is loot, of course, and a hierarchical tech tree to explore. It's these customizations that really provide replayability, along with the three different player classes and varying difficulty levels.

And about those classes. In another nod to Mythos, Torchlight features three archetypal classes: the Destroyer, your basic melée unit; the Vanquisher, the ranged attack type; and the Alchemist, sort of a combination wizard/gadgeteer class. Runic is saving the character appearance customization for their upcoming Torchlight MMO; you get the default look for each class (the Destroyer and Alchemist are male, the Vanquisher is female).