Review: Torchlight

Halloween weekend, I downloaded and played the Torchlight Demo available from Steam. Thus far I have managed to level three characters to level 6.

Torchlight is what I would label as an Action-RPG. I would closely compare it to the Diablo franchise of games crated by Blizzard. As a matter of fact, the guys at Runic are former Blizzard North employees which were responsible for the creation and development of the first two Diablo games. They split off to form Flagship Studios shortly after the release of Diablo 2 and created Hellgate: London and Mythos. When Flagship closed it's doors, Mythos was sold to a Korean-based development company. Runic games was then formed by mostly the same group of talent and Torchlight was conceived to become the release version of what was started with Mythos. Actually, some have called Torchlight a paid beta due to the fact that Runic has said that they are working on an MMORPG game based on Torchlight. Torchlight is a single-player only game, with no Internet play and no LAN support. But don't let yourself believe that it's a bad game because of that. You'd be wrong.

When you first log in to the game, you'll be asked to create a character. There are three possible choices of character type (I use type because 'class' wouldn't necessarily be an accurate description). You can choose a Destroyer, a heavy melee warrior; a Vanquisher, an elite city guard that specializes in ranged weapons such as bows, pistols and rifles; or an Alchemist, a steampunk-inspired spellcaster with the ability to summon his own minion for support. While you can't change their appearance, you will be able to give them a name. You will also be able to select one of two available pets, a cat or a dog, and name them as well.

        

Once you enter the game with your newly created character, you will see a very simple and intuitive interface. For those of you that spent any time at all playing one of the Diablo games or World of Warcraft, you'll feel right at home. The UI pulls in elements from each of those games and does a wonderful job of merging them in to something simple and useful.

Your action bar is settled at the bottom of the screen with your health and mana bulbs in the center. Clicking on any of the action bar slots will display a list of all available spell/item options that can be shortcut to that slot. Simply choose the one you want and click the icon. You can map spells and items to both your action bar and your mouse buttons with an option for an alternative right-click mapping that you can switch between on the fly using the Tab key.

The pet portrait and UI buttons are out of the way in the upper left corner and are balanced out by the transparent mini-map in the upper right corner. You'll be using both of those a lot. The inventory UI for both your character and your pet are very familiar if you've played any of the other games mentioned above. These are very self-explanatory, but make sure you notice that your pet can carry rings and a necklace, two additional learned spells, and as much inventory as your character. Oh, and when the pet's inventory gets all filled up, just click the coin purse icon on the pet portrait and it will run back to town and sell off it's goods and return to you with the gold in a matter of just a few seconds. How cool is that?

    
Although the media considers the three character types to be classes, I refer to them as types, because they are not your stereotypical RPG classes. Yes, each appears to have an area of focus, but upon exploration of their three skill trees, you will find that any of the three can be built to use ranged weapons, martial weapons and spell casting in any combination that you see fit. The only limits to their weapons and armor are the stats needed to equip them, such as strength or dexterity. Also, each character has the option to equip two weapon sets, like in Diablo 2, and can switch between them at any time by pressing 'W' on the keyboard or from the character panel.

As examples of the flexibility, my Destroyer, Bunkai, is dual-wielding axes as his primary set and pistols (yes, one in each hand) as his secondary set. My Vanquisher, Jailyn, has a rifle as her primary weapon and dual wields scimitars as her secondary set. And last but not least, my Alchemist, Aethion, has a Staff and a Wand as his primary set and a pistol and hammer as his secondary set. All of which are very fun to play through the randomly generated and randomly populated dungeons.

    
The gameplay in Torchlight is fast and smooth, even on my out-of-date XP machine with only 1 gig of RAM. There's no frame skipping or stuttering, even when there's a large number of baddies on the screen trying to burn me down. The animations are solid and feel connected to the environment as you'd expect all games to do, and I really hope you like voice acting. There's no shortage of voices to listen to throughout the game.

As I played through the demo, I noticed that there seemed to be somewhere in the ballpark of 5 different types of mobs that you might encounter per environment, and those are randomly generated and spawned so that with each of my characters, though they completed the same content, had unique experiences travelling through that content. And... you can fish! I've fished up about 5 different types of fish so far, and each one can be fed to your pet. Each one will cause your pet to morph in to some other kind of beast. It could be a giant beetle, a spider, or a blob of ooze, but whatever it is, you can be sure that it will have it's own special combat abilities to aid you in battle.

    

Finally, a couple of my most favorite things that I've yet to mention are here. Like in Diablo 2, you have a stash in town to store things that you might not be able to use yet, or want to hang on to for whatever reason. But in Torchlight, you also have a shared stash, which allows you to share items (armor, weapons, gems, spell scrolls, potions,etc.) with your other characters. Any of your characters can add to or remove from the shared stash. I'd really like to see other RPGs take advantage of this feature. The other thing that I really like about Torchlight is that you are given three options for resurrection when you die. All three have variable loss associated with them, and the trade off is the loss for how far away you get reborn. The highest loss will put you right where you died, the middle ground takes you back to the start of the dungeon level that you're on and there's no penalty for starting back at town other than the potentially long run back. I can't believe that we haven't see that in any MMORPGs yet. I also wanted to share the cool x-ray affect used to show things that are "hidden" behind walls... it's not game making/breaking or anything, but it's some interesting and different.

    
I am a big fan of the Diablo series and World of Warcraft, as I'm sure a lot of you already know from listening to our live show on Wednesday nights. But now, you can add Torchlight to that list of things that I'm a big fan of. The things that it does that have been in the genre for years, it does better, and the things that it does that are fresh and new are done well and make a lot of sense for the game and the genre as a whole. I just completed all of the content available in the demo using each character type, so the next step for me is to drop the $20 and pick up the full copy. It is well worth it in my mind, and I hope that you'll agree.