Can you recommend a family-friendly ARPG?

Titan Quest is my favourite mobile game -- the port was damn near perfect. And on PC, it's in a pretty good place with several cheap expansions and ongoing support by THQ Nordic. Titan Quest has the best melee skills of any ARPG IMO, since they can proc off basic attacks as well as certain triggerable ones. You can go fairly complicated with your build (lots of spells and summons) or you can just go Warfare/Defence and dual wield your way to mass slaughter. I love it.

Some say Grim Dawn is better but having played both, I still lean towards TQ for its unique setting, tight class options (dual class systems always rock my world), and just I suppose its familiarity. Grim Dawn is too messy for me. The inventory is a mess. Item complexity is a mess. Lore is a mess. It does everything Titan Quest does and does it more, but not necessarily better.

Also TQ has no blood. It was made specifically to fit certain requirements regarding adult content. No blood. No human enemies (at least in the core game). Kills are dramatic through a fun physics system (more damage=enemy flies away further and faster) but no visual dismemberment or anything like that. And I suppose, skewed though it is, it has some historical value to it. A kid playing it might be interested in learning more about the mythology of the Ancient World -- and the game goes from Ancient Greece to Egypt to Babylon, China, and that's just the base game. The expansions go to Hades, Scandinavia and even Atlantis.

I'd definitely recommend it over most other ARPGs to a younger player for the content alone. IF that younger player isn't already a modern gamer.

OK, we'll definitely check out TQ, I haven't played it, either! Sounds good to me. I was considering good old Loki along those lines, too, though I think she might (hell, nowadays, being used to PoE speed, even I might) find it somewhat boring for being rather slow. Namely, it's not crawling with AoE skills, and your health starts regenerating only when you switch to rest stance, i.e. only when you've been standing without fighting OR moving for a few seconds. Though now that I think of it, that might also be an exercise in patience, so... might not be all that bad. And if I can sit through pandas baking cookies, I can chill for a few seconds for the Viking to regenerate, too, I guess. :D

Update: not an ARPG, of course, but we've started HoM&M 1 with the kid and I'm loving it. :) Plus, it respawned the old fantasy the two of us had way back, of converting and painting minis for all the units from all the Heroes' towns... shelf space, beware. :D

Nobody mentioned minecraft dungeons? Really weird.

Grim Dawn is awesome but NOT family friendly at all.

if top down and jrpg style art is ok, chronicon is a quite fun arpg game that borrows from diablo clones a lot. it's also much deeper than it looks at the first glance. theme-wise its not as family friendly as torchlight but I think its within what you're asking for.

the controls are a bit different than your isometric arpgs though

"

ladish wrote:

Nobody mentioned minecraft dungeons? Really weird.

This. Minecraft dungeons is pretty much "my first arpg" in a nutshell, could not recommend it more !

Gameplay wise its really easy to handle and it still feels pretty punchy, it has a lot of content as well !

Torchlight 1 is a good one, as others have mentioned.

I would also recommend Hades if you run out of options. Sure, it's not a hack and slash with loot, but it has that top-down/isometric action and a chill story / cast of characters.

One family-friendly ARPG that meets your criteria could be Torchlight II. It has simple Diablo-style gameplay, a positive atmosphere with a good vs. evil story, and colorful outdoor environments like forests and mountains. The game has a cartoonish art style and is not too story-heavy, and it's available on GOG. It also has a multiplayer mode, so you can play together as a family.

Minecraft Dungeons. It's pretty simple. Played it with my sisters who have never played anything more complex than mario cart, and they were able to get a grasp of it pretty quickly.

Portal Knights.

If Minecraft had a baby with an ARPG = Portal Knights