Torchlight

I’m primarily a console gamer—I don’t often indulge in the world of PC gaming. Torchlight is one of the many PC games I’ve never enjoyed and the 2009 title has finally made its transition to console with its release on XBOX Live Arcade. Since I’ve never played the PC version, I can’t really comment on the differences between the versions, but I will say that it’s a game that works very well with a controller.

Set in the town of Torchlight, and the mines below it, Torchlight’s story puts you in the boots of one of three characters (a warrior, a mage, or a ranger) as you search for riches in the mines. Every five or so dungeons will “treat” you with a story segment that reveals the nature of the corruption plaguing the mines and the monsters that infest it. The story is never the game’s focus, though, and this is a strength and a weakness for the game—the plot is bland and never aspires to do anything interesting, so fleshing it out more would have just created an unnecessary amount of text boxes read by bored voice actors. On the other hand, there’s little to no driving force to compel the player to continue forward other than looting and leveling.
Looting and leveling, however, provide a great addiction as you make your way through hordes of enemies and pick up their left behinds in hopes that one piece of equipment is better than what you’re carrying. You will never run low on goodies to pick up on the battlefield and you’ll be ever thankful to the developers for giving you a pet that can hold your excess goods as well as travel to town to sell them for you. It’s a great feature that allows you to continue your pillaging and make money at the same time.

Your character and your pet both have 50 inventory slots and they’ll fill up really quickly. A few of my complaints for the inventory system is that there’s no “Organize” feature and your equipped items still take up a place in your bag. These are somewhat minor complaints, but the inability to organize your loot can make for unnecessary menu wandering as you try to find similar or identical items for something like transmuting and what should be a simple task becomes undesirably cumbersome.

The main aspect of gameplay in Torchlight is the combat—it is how you get loot, after all. It’s presented as a rather simple button masher that has you approaching waves of enemies with weapon drawn as you pound mercilessly on the attack button and liberally use your available skills. Although simple, it’s satisfying and you’re bound to be grinning gleefully when you land a brutal crit and see your enemies explode into a fountain of blood (it’s T rated, so no gibs). Killing enemies earns you experience points and fame (there are 100 character levels and 55 fame levels to be earned through fame and XP); each character level will grant you 5 attribute points to spend towards strength, dexterity, magic, and defense and one skill point to use in upgrading or unlocking the various skills available to your character’s class—gaining another fame level also grants you one skill point. It’s standard RPG leveling, but it’s no less satisfying or addicting. The combat, however, does grow repetitive after a while as you’ll constantly find yourself using the same attacks against familiar enemies.

Torchlight also features an endless supply of randomly generated dungeons. It’s a great way to expand the game into what is essentially a “game that never ends,” but the dungeons, even though randomly generated, begin to feel very familiar as there’s a limited amount of assets used in dungeon creation. I even found myself wandering through levels that were near exact in layout as other dungeons I had traversed. It’s great that there’s this endless supply of new areas, but they rarely ever achieve a feeling of newness.

When I played the game, I swore that I wouldn’t complain that it didn’t have multiplayer—multiplayer was never planned in this game, nor was it promised, so I felt that complaining about such a thing would be a pointless argument because this game was never intended to have it (and so many other people have complained about its absence that my statements would be relatively meaningless). However, I feel that having a multiplayer component would have helped to break up the monotony by allowing players to experience different approaches to encounters or trade loot with one another. I also think it would have helped make certain classes and their skills feel more useful—I played as the ranged character and was often unable to actually use my ranged skills as I had nobody to keep the enemies at a distance.

The achievements available in Torchlight are all simple and all but one time consuming cheevo should be easily unlocked through a single playthrough. It’s somewhat disappointing, given how much content is in the game, that they didn’t include more creative or difficult achievements or ones that encouraged multiple playthroughs (for instance, an achievement for playing through the campaign with each character class). Achievements aren’t something to make a judgment on how good or bad a game is, but I like a challenge in my achievement hunting.

Torchlight is undeniably fun and addicting to the point of driving its players to the dangerous levels of unproductiveness, but I also found myself feeling as though getting that next load of loot or earning my next level was more a chore than fun because of the game’s repetitive nature—a better plot or the addition of multiplayer might have been remedies for those complaints. With all that said, there is so much to do and so much loot to find in Torchlight that you will be absorbed in its unending dungeons for countless hours and it’s well-worth the 1200 MSP ($15) price tag.