Developer: Runic Games
Publisher: Runic Games
Rrp: £9.70 (runicgames.com), £9.89 (Gog.com), £10.99 (Steam)
Released: 27th October 2009
Available on Steam, gog.com and their own site.
Played using: mouse and keyboard
A great evil has awoken under the town of Torchlight, adventurers from around the world heed the call to action some for fame, some for gold and some simply to kill stuff. Which kind are you?
Torchlight is what has been called a Action RPG (or ARPG) and you may, while playing Torchlight, find yourself feeling déjà vu and with good reason. You start in a town, get quests from NPC’s (with question marks over their head) and enter a dungeon under the town. If that sounds familiar you likely have played the original Diablo or one of its clones. The other reason for that feeling will also likely be because this game was created by some of the talent from behind Diablo and Diablo two.
When you start the game you get to pick one of three character classes, the destroyer, the vanquisher and the alchemist. These three classes essentially work out as the warrior, archer and Mage respectively.
You also get to choose a pet to come with you on your adventure either a dog, cat or ferret. This is entirely a aesthetic choice as the stats of your pets are the same regardless of which you choose.
Why include a pet you may ask? Well, the pet has a few purposes, aside being adorable that is. Firstly they can aide in combat by attacking your enemies, they also collect gold that you may have missed. Lastly, and this is my favourite feature of the pet, they have storage slots and can be sent into town to sell whatever you put in the aforementioned slots. They run out of the dungeon and return to you with gold, a great time feature that helps stop the flow of the game being interrupted.
Your pet can also be set to one of three stances, aggressive, defensive and passive. Now, I’m sure you can work out what the aggressive and defensive stances do, but what about passive? Any guesses? No? Well when set into this stance the pet will only collect the gold around you, that’s it, it’ll ignore all everything else to that end.
Those who have played Diablo and the like will be familiar with most of the mechanics involved with this game. Of course Torchlight does have a few differences to its contemporaries, such as the inclusion of a pet or the shared stash chest that lets you share items you find between different characters.
This entire game can be played solely with a mouse, but it’s much much easier to use the keyboard in conjunction as the HUD gives the player a ‘hot bar’ to use.
Since Torchlight is a RPG it has a levelling system, and as with most RPG’s killing enemies and completing quests gives you experience points which in turn allows you to level up. It’s when you level up that Torchlight, once again, shows the influence the Diablo series (specifically Diablo 2) had upon it. At the time of levelling up your character will glow, you’ll get told over the speakers and two ‘plus’ symbols will appear on screen one to the left and one to the right. Clicking these with the mouth will open two menu windows, on the left you will see your Character Sheet and the right is Skills. The Character Sheet is pretty standard fair for a RPG of this like, strength, dexterity, magic and defence are all in show, there is one key difference however, but I’ll cover that later.
Increasing a stat, as can imagine, will increase the effectiveness of a weapon or spell that utilises that particular stat.
I mentioned the Skills menu window a moment ago, well it’s within this window that you get to pick a skill to unlock or upgrade. Upgrading makes that particular skill more potent but it means that you may miss a skill that could become useful later. These skills come in two flavours passive and activated. An activated skill is one you must choose to activate or cast while the passive skill will always be working in the background. Of course making a decision on what skill to unlock is made further complicated by the fact that there isn’t just one skill tree to choose from. There’s three to choose between and each class has its own set of powers, so there’s a lot of character customisation to be had.
Do you remember I mentioned something that there was one key difference on the Character Sheet screen? Well that difference is the ‘Fame’ bar, this bar increases only when you complete a task or quest. The Fame bar does only one thing once it has been filled, and that’s to give you an extra skill point to spend. This may seem slightly pointless, since the experience bar does the same thing and gives you the ability to increase your stats. But I would have to disagree with you if you came to at conclusion, in so many RPG’s you’re characters gain fame/notoriety and generally get nothing to show for it. In Torchlight they show that the fame you accrue is useful beyond a mere title and reward you as such.
While playing you will acquire gems of varying qualities, these gems can be used placed within items with ‘socket’ to grant them special powers. The higher the quality of the gem the better the power is, of course, it’s quite rare to find a perfect specimen. That’s where a transmuted comes in, and, as luck would have it, you happen to have one in Torchlight. All you need to do is give him four of the same gem and quality and he’ll turn it into one of the next quality tier up. Rinse and repeat until you have a perfect gem. Unfortunately if you put the gem into a weapon you have to destroy the weapon to get the gem back, or visa versa. There are a couple of vendors in Torchlight who will do this for you, for a price of course.
Combat is a very basic affair, you left click with your mouse on the target and your character will attack or interact with it and right clicking uses a skill or magic spell that you have set to default. If your using the keyboard at the same time (something I highly recommend) you’ll be able to assign skills, spells and items to certain buttons on your keyboard making life much easier. Something that is a clear hold over, and a good idea, from the Diablo games is the [shift] keys function. If you hold the shift key while in combat your character will stand in place and use their weapon rather than rush toward the enemy, this is very useful for spellcasters or a character using a ranged weapon.
One very nice function that Torchlight does, that I’ve never seen in any game of this type is the weapon swapping. What do I mean by ‘weapon swapping’ well within your inventory there is a function to equip and swap between two weapon sets. This means you can have your nice sword and shield and then with a simple button press ([w] by the way) you can switch to a ranged weapon.
There’s a good variety of enemies to be found while play Torchlight, very few of which are recolours or reskins of previous ones you’ve encountered. As you can expect the further down into the depths of Torchlight you go the more difficult these creatures become and on occasion you’ll fight a special one that’s stronger than the rest. If I do have a fault with Torchlight regarding the enemies it’s that you know when you’re going to face a boss like clockwork. They occur every five floors, like clockwork and there’s always a door to open just before you get to them. To me this, spoiled the fun slightly, because I knew I could just use a town portal spell to go to town and prepare, making the whole thing seem a little less challenging than it could have done.
One of the feature I like more than I probably should is the title screen. Rather than be a static image it shows the way your character looks right now complete with a background matching the area you last were playing in. It’s such a minor thing but it helps make the game feel more polished than many that ape it.
When it comes to graphical fidelity Torchlight won’t win any prizes, it’s not ugly but nor is it particularly beautiful, Skyrim this is not. But y’know what? I don’t need or want it to be that. The graphical style, while a little on the chunky side, suits the type of game it is. All the characters, NPC and player character alike, stand out among the various backdrops you fight through. And when your busy fighting a horde of ratlings, you don’t really care that you can’t see each individual hair of their fur. It’s colourful without being garish and if a few spells go off at once the screen can be awash with lighting effects and I can still see the fight clearly. That to me is a win.
I would most certainly recommend this game to pretty much anyone who enjoys a good dungeon dive. It has a fair amount of replayabilty especially if you install some of the mods that are available online or through the Steam Workshop for it.
If you liked that then perhaps try;
Diablo 2
Titan Quest
Kingdoms of Amalur
