Dragon Age has been pretty thoroughly hyped, what with all the emphasis on your character origin and how it affects the story. And I must say it's a really well-done game. My favorite thing is the banter between your NPCs. It seems every pair of NPCs has a long list of running conversations that are frankly hilarious. Especially Zhevran, who is a lech, and Morrigan, who is snark personified (and voiced by Claudia Black). But as I'm playing it, I'm having less fun than I really should. Part of this is combat - I realize this is squad-based combat, and you're supposed to micromanage. But really, I have enough to do just fiddling with my mage and trying to avoid catching my own party in friendly fire with my absurdly overpowered AOEs. Having to stop all the time to keep everyone focus-fired on one target or not run off into an AOE effect that's already in place or the like quickly saps my enjoyment from combat segments. Everything else I like, but there's so much combat.
Conversely, Torchlight is nothing but combat. The storyline is thin-to-nonexistent, but as a concentrated Diablo you don't really expect much. And the combat is fun. It is of course just one player, but you have lots of options (with a diablo-style class and skill system), and they're all fun. Good loot, and very very easily moddable. One thing that I disliked about Dragon Age is that there was no way to respec. At all. And there's no way to tell without experience which skills are valuable and which ones are underpowered. Torchlight had no respec option to begin with, but the modability meant that they could release a respec mod very quickly. So far as I can tell, Dragon Age is not hugely mod-friendly.
While I like them both, I think Torchlight is actually better value for money.
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