Torchlight
It would be entirely unfair to not preface this review with the fact that one of my favorite game series is Diablo. When Diablo first came out I was play ing Command & Conquer and X-COM exclusively, partially because they were what I preferred but also because of ignorance to video games as a whole. Then on a faithful day sometime late in my junior year of high school a friend handed me a burned CD with the word “Diablo” written on it (I have since purchased the Diablo Battlechest twice, so I swear I made up for that burned copy) and my PC gaming habits changed forever.
I have spent more hours spelunking in randomly generated dungeons grabbing randomly generated loot across the two main Diablo games and both their expansions then I really care to think, and sadly; Torchlight is going to drag me down that hole too.
The comparisons to Diablo don’t end at my musings about childhood either. The Runic Games employee roster reads like a who’s who of ex-Blizzard employee’s, up to and including the two men who founded Blizzard-North, the company that made the Diablo franchise what it is today and that fact can be felt throughout the entire product.
Also a fter spending time with an early build of Diablo III and now playing through Torchlight I can tell you definitively that Torchlights inspirado isn’t exclusively pulled from the previous entries in the Diablo series either. To the point that I have to assume people working at Runic Games were in the least part of d esign meetings for Diablo III while it was in early production.
I know for some people the previous two paragraphs are all they needed to judge this game and are already eagerly waiting for Torchlight to finish downloading off Steam, but for those who need more information, never fear I have your backs.
The biggest difference between the two games (Diablo and Torchl ight) will be its visual style, which is funny in its own way, because Torchlights visual style pulls heavily from another Blizzard product, World of Warcraft. For some the whimsical over exaggerated style will be a turn off I’m sure, but I found it endearing. On top of that, because of this style this game runs beautifully even on my extremely low end Dell Insperon 1318 with the settings put to medium.
Out of the fifteen hours I have put into Torchlight I have encountered exactly zero bugs and glitches and have not run out of things to do. While the main storyline has finished the game features the same difficulty progression you had in Diablo, being able to take your character from the lower difficulty up until he is a complete badass at 100 level in Torchlights version of Nightmare difficulty.
On top of that, the game features randomly dropped and Quest reward items called M aps that when used open portals to one off dungeons filled with loot and bosses who are themselves filled with loot like virtual loot piñatas waiting for you to break them open and take their yummy yummy loot. MMmmmmmmmm loot…. Anyways, these map items in themselves tack on hours of game play outside of the normal story.
Also there is a series of quests given to you by a “Treasure Hunter” that are one off dungeons he opens up for you that you then go in and get a treasure for him, keeping all magical items and gold for yourself. With 50 of these to do, they could have been a hefty game all by themselves.
Another big thing at least for me is you start the game off feeling pretty studly. With your 1 level crits able to explode enemies with their power, I should say I finished my play through on normal, but I feel that Torchlight uses numbers for difficulty and not power. This can make some boss fights feel one sided, that side being yours, but there is something to that I find fun if done right and in at least my opinion it was done right here. I must put a giant caveat on this statement by saying the final boss is none of this. He is ridiculously over powered, over armored and has far too much health. In desperation I finally cracked and went online to see what trick I was missing, seeing that it was that I had not built my Alchemist like a Warrior, I had to kill the boss the hard way. It takes what could have been a fun fight and turns it into a grind, with you doing as much damage as possible before dying and repeating. Overall a very ugly point in an otherwise beautiful game.
A huge improvement over the Diablo series though is your pet. Its neat that it can be outfitted with items , its neat that it can have its own spells that it casts independent of you, its neat you can feed it fish to turn it into other creatures (WoW anyone?) and its neat that it will attack and kill foes with you. That’s all fine and dandy, the real meat of the issue here is you can load it up with junk and send it back into town to sell it for you .
That’s right, when your bag fills with junk, identify it and put the crap on your pet and send it off to town to sell it for you. After a small amount of time he comes back. Leaving you able to continue killing and looting in the dungeon with out the hassle of leaving the dungeon and going to town to sell all the loot you’re getting. It seems like such a small change, but after the first few times of using it you will realize it is one of the biggest strokes of genius in the game.
I’m not sure how I really tell you about the game play with out just finding a review of Diablo II and pasting it here. If you have played Diablo or a game like Diablo you have played Torchlight. Its based around looking down on your character while he or she walks around a dungeon killing things to get items to get better to kill bigger things to get better loot to kill bigger things…. You get the picture. If you know what type of game that is, then know Torchlight is an exceedingly good example of that type of game.
I have two problems with the game and a gripe that could be a problem for you or not.
The first problem is a general lack of explanation. The biggest example of this is a rating you have called Fame which progresses as you kill bosses. I have no idea what this stat does. I still don’t. I haven't gone out of my way to look it up outside the game, but I shouldn’t have to do that. This slight over sight of adding in game explanations for things pervades the experience; you need to know right now if you die inside a Map item and respawn to town, you just lost that map item and all the loots that were inside it. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
My second complaint is that the random level generation seems to be based on much larger blocks than Diablo or Diablo II. Where as Diablo seems to base a levels generation off of individual squares, Torchlight appears to base its random generations off of blocks of rooms, so you end up seeing the same couple room set up from time to time throughout the dungeons.
My gripe is the games total lack of multiplayer. Playing Diablo co-op with my fiancé is how we bonded early in our relationship, and my friends jumping in made the experience even more fun. Torchlight has a mod community, with one mod being dedicated to bringing co-op to the game, but officially from Runic Games there are no plans to make Torchlight multiplayer, they are apparently saving that for the Torchlight MMO that should be coming out eventually.
Over all this game is so derivative that if you don’t like the source material don’t even bother. However, if you do like the source material, then the hundreds of levels of dungeons, skills and loot will be more then enough to justify its twenty dollar price tag on Steam, I even was able to get my copy for five dollars off a Steam special and I literally feel like I stole the game from them.
