My Review of Torchlight

After hearing nothing but good things about Torchlight on blogs and Twitter I decided to look it up. From the first view on their website I figured I wouldn’t like it, but downloaded the demo nonetheless. And that was fortunate, because Torchlight is a really good game.

Everyone who mentions Torchlight also mention Diablo in the same sentence, and rightly so. The game has its own graphic style and story, but everything else is heavily borrowed from Diablo and Diablo II. However, Runic Games, who made this game, consist of people who made Diablo and Diablo II in the first place, so I can forgive them for this rip-off.

The basics

If you have ever played some of the Diablo games you know what this game is all about. You travel down into a mine, and then deeper and deeper as progress in the story. Each level of the dungeons is straightforward journey from point A to point B, and completely packed with trash mobs that you blast through. Now and then there is a boss or mini-boss to fight, and your character collect better gear and more powerful spells and abilities. And that’s about it.

The story is quite shallow about a corrupted wizard and a mysterious ore known as the Ember. But really, it could have said “chase the white rabbit” for all I care about the story in these kind of games. Diablo had some nice background lore, but it doesn’t matter. These kinds of games are all about gameplay. So if you love games with rich storylines this either is not for you or you need to learn to relax and enjoy the ride, your choice.

But since Runic Games are planning to make a MMO of the Torchlight world I think they could have worked more on the lore. Although Torchlight is fun, it doesn’t convince me that a MMO would be a good idea at all. Instead I would have liked if they continued on Torchlight and made it a online game just like Diablo. But, that’s their problem, and for an entirely different game.

There is no character customization whatsoever involved, except naming your character, which is a shame. One neat feature in Torchlight is a companion, which is either a dog or a cat. They have an inventory that you can dump stuff in when yours get full, and with a single click send them to town sell everything they carry to the vendor. Then they return to where you are in the dungeon with the cash. It only takes a couple of minutes, and it’s nice not having to personally visit the town every 20 minutes.

Gameplay

I played the game as an Alchemist, which in Diablo II terms is a mix of Necromancer, Sorceress, and a little bit of Druid. Aside from the Alchemist there is also the Destroyer and Vanquisher, who could be seen as Barbarian and Amazon respectively.

The Alchemist has powerful offensive and defensive magic spells, and summoned minions such as imps and golems. You have three talent trees, but you don’t have to follow a path and can just drop points wherever you want as long as you meet the level requirements. Aside from spells from the talent trees you also have four slots where you can place spells you buy from vendors (or drop). You can also give your dog/cat two spells, and with some thinking you can come up with great synergies between you and your pet. I for example had my pet freezing mobs in place so I could nuke them from afar.

While the dog is intelligent enough to run and sell stuff in town and find its way back to me twenty levels below in a couple of minutes, the rest of the minions are not as bright. They tend to get stuck in rooms and I often had to resummon or fight without them.

I decided right from the start to play the game in Hard more, since I wanted a challenge. The fun in hack’n’slash games comes form just hack’n’slashing, but if it gets too easy it can become tedious. Hard felt very easy in the beginning, but after level 10 or so I started encountering mobs that hit like trucks, and I had to rethink my strategies and gear. Occasionally a mini-boss would turn around and one-shot me anyway, magic shield or no magic shield, which was a little off-putting. I started the game feeling like a god, and at the end I had to run in circles to survive. This is fine since I have minions beating on them while I run around.

There are different themes as you venture deeper into the dungeons. You have the mines, normal crypts, caves, jungle ruins, a goblin siege camp, a dwarven fortress (which I thought was the most fun), and a bunch of other areas. Most of them are quite beautiful and the lightning really does wonders, despite the somewhat cartoonish art style.

While boss fights at the end of levels were challenging, they all faded in comparison to the last fight. It was a fight so far out on the Epic scale that it nearly fell off. Nefarian has nothing on this guy. My standard damage spells usually drops mobs in one or two hits, but after using my entire mana pool on the boss his health bar barely moved. I don’t know exactly how long time it took, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something like 30 minutes. Usually he was trying to eat my minions and just ignore me, but occasionally there would be adds spawning all over the place that hit like trucks, so it was far from easy.

Once he is beaten the game is technically over, but you have now unlocked the “Endless Dungeon”. It keeps spawning random dungeon levels forever, and I can’t figure out if that’s a blessing or a curse. Vendors also sell maps that when used will open a portal to a random dungeon. So you could actually play this game forever.

User Interface

The game set out to be very entry friendly and easy to get into, and while it succeeds at the gameplay it fails a bit with lacking tooltips and UI. Magic spells has strange information, for example some get “20% weapon damage”. So if I improve my weapon my spells hit harder. I think. I actually invested in dexterity (there is strength, dexterity, magic and defense) since I saw it increased my ranged damage, which I had with my wand. But magic also increased the ranged damage… so go figure. Tooltips could definitely need a cleanup so they are clearer.

I also found the UI very lacking as an Alchemist summoner. At some point I would have 6 nether imps, 2 golems, 1 dog, 7 skeleton archers, and a whole army of skeleton warriors doing my bidding. And when mobs where running everywhere and the whole place seemed to be on fire (*nefarious laughing*) it was just impossible to tell how many I had left since there was no unitframes except for the dog. I found myself stopping and counting my imps after each fight to see if I needed to resummon some of them.

The controls are exactly like Diablo II, so if you are a D2 veteran you can jump right in and feel at home. Left-clicking is standard attack and moving, and right-click is a pre-determined spell, with a secondary spell quickly available for switching with the tab key. I remember back when I played Diablo II I was an expert with this kind of setup. Bind different spells to keys, and it changed the spell to be used with the right mouse button. However games as evolved since then, and I’m now used to a system like in World of Warcraft, where I place spells on action bars and press those buttons. Since you only have 10 buttons, and two of those needs to go to health and mana potions, and since only 1-5 are within reach on the keyboard that leaves not much room. This brings us to the next point.

Mods

Keybindings. Why do I write about this under a “Mods” title? Because it’s not available. If you want to change keys you have to dig deep into the system, past hidden folders, and open up a settings file with notepad. And then you have to enter codes from a chart for each character you want to bind. Not very user-friendly. This is also happens to be where you need to place mods.

Hopefully we will see some useful mods coming to the game, but one that should be standard is the Respec mod. In the game there is no way to reset your talent points, just like it was in Diablo II. But the world has, once again, moved on since then, and the ability to not have to level a new character because you put one point wrong is standard nowadays, but the Runic Games developers disagreed. This is quite ironic since it’s one of said devs that created the Respec mod.

TLDR

This became quite a long review, but I had so much I wanted to say about this game. Torchlight is one of those games that doesn’t promise much, but delivers anyway. The features seem small, the story is shallow, but it’s fun. It might borrow heavily from games like Diablo, but they do it right and add their own touch to it. If you loved Diablo you are going to love Torchlight, and if you are out to just have fun you couldn’t pick a better game. It doesn’t cost much (16€)… so why not?

PS: there is also fishing in the game. But I thought it was a stupid waste of time in World of Warcraft and I still think it is in Torchlight.