another (positive) surprise title of the year along with arkham asylum

Check out the demo.

Runestar seal of approval. (Based on demo version)

The demo is pretty big and generous. Great demos really let you properly test the games. The Witcher also did this by having almost the complete chapter 1 as the demo. it's atleast around 80 percent of the whole chapter including nearly all the available sidequests. Torchlight does roughly the same as you have basically what you could call ''chapter 1'' and then you have bunch of sidequests and access to those random extra dungeons through buying dungeon maps. And you have 3 classes and you can swap items between characters with shared stash which i've recently seen in another diablo-like game Depths of peril (which happens to have a big demo too) and obviously in most MMO games out there. Level and Fame cap are at 7 which is probably set to stop you from remaining grinding in the demo pmpl. Every fame level adds skill points so you can get some specializations maxed with a few extra skills.

This also reminds me of Hellgate London demo in which you have access to fair number of stuff but it was kinda broken in two ways: 1) the training area enemies give most EXP in the game, which basically allows you to quit before finishing it and just grinding through it a couple of times to hit the level cap of 5 pretty fast. 2) the demo doesn't have a real end. You simply run out of missions and the last part of demo does not have the entrance to the area which follows in full game. It's still a fair demo but should have had an end point with the usual coming soon-trailer or something...

TorchLight is a highly recommended game btw. And it usually comes cheap on Steam.

INDIE b*mP