Repetition has never been so fun
If you are longing for the days past of killing mindless hordes of enemies in your bedroom at 2:00 am then Torchlight is here to scratch your itch. This is by no means a ground breaking game, focusing primarily on the tried and true mechanics of the dungeon crawlers of yesteryear. The beauty of Torchlight is in its simplicity and focus. The game does not throw complex enemies at you and it does not try to over burden you with strategy. What it does instead is give you a bounty of loot to sort through that is so decidingly "old school", it is hard not to smile at the charm.
This is the perfect game to kill time with and you can quickly find yourself sitting down on a rainy afternoon as you delve into the hyper colored worlds of blue and orange hacking away at hordes of orcs and zombies. The PC translation of this game over to XBL is done surprisingly well and while switching magic sets can be a bit tedious, the overall implementation of the controller is incredibly well done and easy to handle. The menus in the came are quite obviously coming over from the PC world and are at first overwhelming to handle with a controller.
Battle mechanics are very simple, perhaps too simple for some people as I found that I needed almost no strategy when I had 200+ potions banked up in my sack. The joy of course comes from the loot, equipping your character, leveling them up and selling stuff off. It is the customization that makes this game special and while I would have liked to have been able to realize my character more in the story, having a character that is "mine" is always satisfying. It is funny how this game takes so many aspect of what we see in JRPG's such as the grinding and characterization and somehow makes them fun. For a game where the entire premise is basically grinding through a dungeon to get more experience, I always had the "one more go" syndrome going as I wanted to get that next level.
Overall this is a perfect game for XBL and it is a perfect throwback to a game mechanic way too long not seen on the console. pick this one up as it is certainly one of the best on XBL.
