IMHO, Torchlight is much better than Fate in many ways. I have been playing for 3 days now, and I'm loving it. Overall, I'd say that Torchlight is just not as good as Diablo 2, the latter being much deeper with much more options available. However, TL is great in it's own way, and it's great for a quick jolt of fun for when you don't have time to play "bigger games". If this game had a multiplayer aspect to it, (Coop/PvP) it's awesomeness factor would raise 2x times.
One of the biggest improvements over Diablo 2 I see here are the dungeon maps that can be bought from a vendor. These are cheap and they open a portal to a random dungeon with a random level. This allows you to extend your adventures by a very large margin and gives you more high level monsters, loot, etc.
Fishing shouldnt be frowned upon either.
My two complaints is that I wish the pet wasn't always with you by default, but instead you could "rent" mercs like in Diablo. The other thing I dont like is that the Alchemist's Skill (Ember Lance) is way owerpowered, making him pretty much "godly" and untouchable. The power hose, the ray of light, the doom laser, the hose of destruction, the beam of death... Whatever you want to call it. It owns.. It obliterates, it cannot be stopped by anything! Even it level 1 it can take care of most of the game easily. The problem with this skill is that it's damage renews every second, and it is linked into a continuous beam where the game checks for a critical modifier on every hit. This results in hundreds of criticals in a very short amount of time. On top of that the lance does knockback and seems to benefit from the added fire/poison/ice/whatever bouses you get from your equipment, although I may be wrong about that last bit. It's simply INSANE...
Not necessarily a huge issue, because you can choose other skills and avoid ember lance to make your experience harder. Also, the ember lance alchemist is great for "farming" items for other characters and other alchemist builds. ; )
I really hope that the PvP element will be finally added in the future, allowing me to "pwn" you all with my "uberleet" toon, again, again, and again. ; )