Torchlight Review

December 9, 2009

Enjoyable hack ‘n slash dungeon crawler that quickly runs thin on content.

Story

Torchlight is a small mining town which happens to reside on top of a large Ember vein. This magically mining ore has tremendous powers and as such it is a great source for adventurers looking to obtain power. However, trouble is brewing beneath the town as the Ember is corrupting the minds of those exposed to it. Deep underground something is awakening, so adventurers passing by take it on themselves to save the town. But will it be too late?

The Game

Those who are avid hack ‘n slash gamers will quickly recognize Torchlight and how it is played, simply because the game draws heavily from the classic hack ‘n slash, dungeon crawler Diablo. Everything from the gameplay, the mechanics, and the music reminds the player that this game has been done before and with great success.

When you start playing you are given the option to select a character, there are three characters to choose from, and they are:

The Destroyer – a melee warrior archetype but with the ability to draw power from his ancestors.
The Vanquisher – she is a ranged rogue type character utilizing traps and ranged attacks to their fullest potential.
The Alchemist – the magic user of the bunch. He also possesses the Focus Glove which, for example, can be used to deal damage.

The playable characters are very different in terms of gameplay as they all have different skills and thus play differently. They also have passive skills, which are the same for every character which quite frankly feels a little cheap – a missed opportunity? The game offers some basic customization options for each character as they can be played in a couple of different ways. For instance, you can decide to rely on minions instead of raw damage when you play the Alchemist, or you can decide to play the Destroyer either by using a two-handed weapon or two one-handed weapons. As the Vanquisher you can either focus on ranged attacks or melee attacks.

Content

After creating your character and choosing your pet companion you are asked to pick a difficulty setting between either Easy, Normal, Hard or Very Hard. Your pet which can be either a dog or a cat, works as both extra inventory space and a companion to help you out in combat. You can also make your pet return to the village to sell any loot you have found making it a valuable partner. You can change your pets attributes and appearance by feeding it fish found by fishing in various locations around the dungeons. Fishing can also give you gold or additional beneficial effects like faster attack speed, more armor, more damage and so on. There are plenty of different fish with different appearances but these only last a couple of minutes, some last up to an hour.
After selecting a difficulty setting, the game starts off by showing you the background story of whatever character you chose to play as. These stories are only a couple of sentences long which of course feels a little short, but they do provide you with enough story to understand each of the characters motivation as to why they decided to journey to Torchlight.

You are then quickly thrown into the main story – the village is under attack by monsters. There are some optional quests which are given one after the other by a NPCs located in the village. These optional quests are the very similar all the way through the game, meaning that the objective is either “kill a boss” or “find this Ember”. These two types of quests take place in the main dungeon along with the main quest. The village however, has its own quest which is a “random” dungeon where you are asked to travel and recover an artifact. The term “random” in this game is rather loose, considering that the same layout appears multiple times in a short period of time. This does ruin the exploration aspect of the dungeons as most of the time, you will be very familiar with the supposedly “unknown” locations you are sent to explore.

Besides following the story and doing optional quests, you can decide to purchase maps which, when used, summon a portal to a dungeon. The maps are sorted by level so you can pick and choose the exact level range that matches your character. These dungeons are also short but filled with treasures, and of course monsters and traps.

Sooner or later when you’ve collected enough experience points your character will eventually “level up”. This will give you five points to spend on the various character attributes which are: Strength, Dexterity, Defense, and Magic. Each one increases different aspects of your character. For example, Strength increases melee damage, Dexterity increases ranged damage, Defense increases your health and armor rating and Magic increases spell damage.

Also, whenever you level up you are also given a skill point. You can use these to increase the effectiveness of a skill or learn a new one. The maximum skill level caps out at ten, but it can be increased further through equipment bonuses.

Each character has three different skill trees, which basically is three different sets of skills and they all have their own strengths and weakness. However, choosing whatever skill you want or need is no problem as the game does not restrict you from picking and choosing as you please. This is a great addition as most other games with a skill tree doesn’t allow you to pick freely among the skills. Also when defeating more powerful monsters you will gain fame. This acts like an additional experience bar but the difference is that fame only grants you additional skill points.

The focus of the game is the vast amount of weapons, armor, items and so forth that you can find. The variety is huge because every character has different looking armors. The number of different beneficial effects found on weapons and armor are lacking though. There are plenty of different weapons for each character but some more wouldn’t have hurt.
Equipment has both level- and attribute requirements meaning that you must meet these conditions before you can use them. These are randomized so you must find equipment with fitting requirements for your character. Equipment is also color coded so items marked with blue color are of better quality than white ones for instance. This has been seen in multiple games and it is a easy and convenient way to make comparing equipment a lot easier.

Torchlight does not support multiplayer in any way, which would have been a perfect addition to this type of game. This has already been proven by many games before, but somehow they decided the single-player aspect would suffice. And as such the game does not last that long after completing the game, which takes roughly 10 hours (and this includes doing optional quests as often as possible). However, after completing the game for the first time you can start making quests in the “Endless Dungeon”. So, if you didn’t get tired of the same patterns in the main game you can continue to quest in this dungeon.

The game relies heavily on its community as it is built with that in mind – people making custom mods and levels for the game. This is the way the developers decided they would increase the lasting appeal of the game.

Controls

Torchlight is played from a set isometric camera view, but you are able to zoom in and out. Moving around in the game world is done by simply pointing and clicking around the screen and the same goes for the combat. During combat, you can quickly access your skills using the hotkey bar, you can easily assign skills to the hotkey bar by simply clicking on a skill making a menu pop-up showing you all currently available skills and items. This makes for a smooth experience as assigning skills is something you will be doing a lot.

Graphics

The graphics are cartoonish and somewhat generic. The cartoon aesthetic has been strongly influencing games for years now, and while the game certainly looks good, you feel like it could have been so much better. The character- and monster design is not all that inspiring nor is it very creative, but the game does offer some nice variety and its own take on the comic book style.
The game is very colorful and has many eye-catching lighting effects. The levels have a nice level of detail, so there’s quite a lot to explore here.

Sound

As expected the sound effects are something you will be hearing constantly in a hack ‘n slash game, but they did a good job with them in Torchlight. There are exceptions of course, but generally speaking the game has a great variety of sounds throughout the game.

The music is definitely something that will bring back memories in many avid fans of the Diablo franchise, as it could have been taken straight from that game. It has acoustic guitars, lutes, flutes and massive war drums – it sounds very much like a fantasy soundtrack, and it has both gloomy parts, and sometimes it’s more atmospheric. While it draws attention away from Torchlight, it certainly fits the game and its eerie atmosphere rather well.
Throughout the game you will be treated to some pretty decent voice acting, but it’s pretty seldom that you will hear anything else besides grunts, moans and so forth.

Summary

Torchlight is without a doubt a great disappointment in many ways. The premise and concept could have given so much more, but the game feels rushed and more like a demo than a real game. Three characters with shared skills feels cheap and does not help the short lasting appeal of the game. Playing the different characters does present some fresh variety, but it’s simply not enough to last a longer time. For the short while it lasts though, Torchlight is a decent game, and it is enjoyable pretty much from the start until the end. Towards the end though, the game will remind you of how little the game actually had to offer. That discovery alone will make most people realize that there are much better games currently out there…