Torchlight

In a time and age where every good game concept known to man has been remade countless times with good success, it has always eluded me why nobody dared to plagiarize the classic Diablo franchise. With the last entry in the series appearing in 2001, there should have been plenty of time to work on a sequel that's at least as awesome as Lord of Destruction was. Remember that one? It was still great in 2004, and will always be in my heart for it's insane replay value, but the game hasn't aged well on the technical side. A hardcoded graphics resolution just doesn't work well with LCD monitors that also use fixed width and height, even more when they are widescreen.

So, yeah, it's amazing nobody had the idea of "lets go modernize Diablo", until now (we'll ignore the fact that Blizzard announced Diablo 3 a year ago since they won't finish it before 2011). But it's no surprise to see who's behind Torchlight: the core of the original Diablo team, without Bill Roper, but with some more talent added for good measure. It's a small team, so what can they do to compete with the behemoth that is Blizzard? Quite alot, as it turns out.

First things first - Torchlight is a blatant ripoff of the original Diablo game design. Small town in distress by an ancient evil stirring below? Yup. Lone hero to solve problem? Check. Dungeon with lots and lots of floors? Of course. Town portals, loot pouring out of every orifice, 24/7 blacksmith services? You betcha. It couldn't get any more obvious than this, but still, it does - as soon as you hit the first loading screen, you'll hear a seemingly familiar tune. Responsible is exactly the Matt Uelmen who composed the original's haunting music, and the soothing, relaxed guitar arrangement is as familiar as it's memorable.

Torchlight also integrates key features from Diablo 2 and Lord of Destruction. Items can be enhanced with gems, and the Alchemist NPC in town will serve as a Horadric Cube replacement, offering free transmutations if you know the recipe. There's also a gambler, where the player can spend all his hard earned gold for worthless junk (or kickass upgrades, you never know), and an Enchanter. This last NPC is a new feature, and enables you to upgrade items with random enchants or sockets for a nominal fee - and a chance to either get nothing or lose the item entirely. This can be quite addicting, because you can get simply incredible stats on your gear for a low cost, but like the gambler, it can quickly backfire as well, leaving you with a worthless item and no money.

The three character classes - Destroyer (melee fighter), Alchemist (mage) and Vanquisher (ranged damage) - resemble those from Diablo close enough, but instead of just using purchaseable spell books to give abilities to the player's character, Torchlight draws on inspiration from both games - there are spells to find and/or buy, but the player also has access to talent trees, just like in Diablo 2. There aren't just combat spells in there, but also passive enhancements like a permanent bonus to your damage as long as you dual wield, or an increase in Magic Find and coin drops.

The gameplay itself hasn't changed in a bit: you get a few quests (handily pointed out by WoW-like exclamation marks) and venture into the randomly generated dungeon. Here, it's a mine instead of a haunted church, but the environment changes every few floors, quickly giving way to crypts, vast halls, a goblin fort surrounded by lava and finally, a dark citadel. All of these areas are crawling with monsters to dispatch by simply attacking them with left or right click. Skills and items like potions can be bound to both mouse buttons and number keys, and the action on the right mouse button can also be switched quickly by pressing the Tab key. Anyone who ever played Diablo will instantly recognize how this works, as the controls are exactly the same.

The main draw Diablo had was the loot, and Torchlight again draws from both episodes of the franchise to create a successful mix. Beyond simple "green" and "blue" items with random stats, there is Unique loot with vastly improved power over the generic stuff, and set items, colored in purple, which boast bonuses for wearing
a certain number of items from the same set. These set parts also have random stats, which make them a bit disappointing, but the bonuses can still make them worth wearing. Item stats are similar to Diablo 2, although without exotic stuff like creating these laggy poison novas on striking an enemy. It's all nothing new, but it doesn't have to, as finding awesome gear, and basically knowing you'd always be able to improve your character somewhat, was mostly the part that made Diablo such a fun game.

Loot drops in torrents, and your small inventory will soon be overflowing with various junk you don't need. Luckily, your character has a pet - a cat or dog - to his disposal, which can carry stuff for him, and even better, bring the loot to the town vendor to sell off while you're adventuring. That's about the best use the little bugger has, since it's combat abilities are just pitiful. Even though it can be buffed with rings and a necklace, and teached various spells, it's hardly able to even withstand a single enemy on higher levels. It never dies, though, so at least there's no annoying fee to pay for it's resurrection (unlike the mercenaries in Diablo 2, where this feature obviously stems from). It wouldn't have hurt to make the pet entirely unattackable, but as it stands, it sometimes has limited use to offtank some enemy for a second.

There's little story in Torchlight beyond the fact that there's great evil below the town, which you have to defeat. Don't expect wonders like Blizzard's famous cutscenes here, all sequences are done in-engine and are generally completely forgettable. Once you defeat the "great evil", which kind of resembles Diablo, but isn't identical with him for obvious reasons, the story ends with two sentences about your heroics. Instead of restarting the game on the next difficulty, however, you'll be treated with another dungeon entrance. This time, there's no story, but you can get an endless string of random quests from two NPCs outside.

One of the major issues with the original games, as said earlier, was the hardcoded graphics resolution of up to 1024x768 in Lord of Destruction, which doesn't really fit today's standards anymore. Of course, Torchlight is full 3D, and this is utilized exactly like the first glimpses of Diablo 3 showed us - monsters sometimes surprise the player by appearing through trapdoors, mine shafts, what have you. Beyond that, the dungeons now feature platforms and stairs as well as moveable bridges, and ranged enemies can in fact shoot the player from elevated spots if he gets to close. The art style certainly looks like it was inspired by World of Warcraft, cartoony environments and all, but it still manages to stand for itself without resembling Blizzard's MMO all too much. The enemy design is closer to the original, with skeletons, zombies and the obligatory voodoo flayers, but there are also giant spiders, dwarves and completely outlandish creatures to boot. It's a bit of a strange mix and sometimes the enemy types don't seem to fit the colorful environments, but since the monsters are merely fodder for your blade, gun or staff, it's all the same. On the audio front, there's Matt Uelmen's soundtrack as mentioned, which is okay, but not all that great. A decent cast of voice actors bring the NPCs to life, and many sound effects are literally identical to their original counterparts. An announcer adds some flavor, telling you that "a trap has been sprung!" or "your pet has departed!", but this can lead to annoying situations where the announcement that the player's pet is fleeing is repeated over and over again because, well, the pet is constantly being clubbed to almost-death. 
 
Modders will be delighted to hear that Torchlight is way easier to modify than Diablo 2 was. The UI is XML based, and Runic Games already released a complete editor suite called TorchEd, which enables players to change about anything in the game. Gone are the days of patching code with a hex editor to implement even the slightest changes.
 

A little shadow is even where there is (Torch)light. One thing even the original designers didn't learn from their time at Blizzard is how to create a good user interface. Sure, it works, but it looks absolutely horrid, with a much too large, Comic Sans MS-inspired font and terrible use of space. There's no multiplayer at the time of writing, which kind of breaks the long term replayibility for me, but since the game is so cheap and Runic Games mentioned a coop mode being in the works, it's no big deal. What's probably a bit worse is the broken balance. Torchlight features four difficulty settings, from easy over Hard to Very Hard. Sadly, Easy and Medium are far too easy, and so is Hard, at least until dungeon floor 30. At that point, the tuning just completely breaks apart - it's still very possible to play the game, but combat turns into a ridiculous mess of normal monsters going between randomly doing almost no damage and killing the player in two hits. Of course, this can always be countered by chain drinking healing potions, so you'll be soon dumping all your gold into these, even though they drop plenty. While this is technically how end-game Diablo and Diablo 2 often turned out as well, the change of balance is so sudden that the last few story levels are a bit tedious. Ironically, the bosses are all pretty weak compared to the trash before them. Lastly, the level loading times are a bit too long for such a small game.

But honestly, there's little not to like about Torchlight if you liked Diablo, which is made even easier by the fact that it's a low budget title that retails for only $20 - although it's only available via digital distribution at the moment. What Runic Games has done is exactly the technical refresh fans of the original always have hoped for, and for such a small, independent company, that's a huge feat.