So, the developers behind Diablo have given it another crack. No, not Blizzard, the other ones, Runic Games. Available off Steam for a reasonable £15, or 6 billion of your best Zimbabwe dollars, Torchlight is an old school RPG that thousands of people have been waiting for since Diablo 2 stopped supporting our native resolutions.
Torchlight is set in the mining town of… Torchlight. You go into the mine on the outskirts to do missions/quests, and come out to receive bits of loot for your troubles; it’s nothing ground breaking, but it works. In the town itself you have your usual array of merchants, enchanters, quest figures and, in true Diablo fashion, a guy who you can buy unidentified crap off in the vague hope it doesn’t turn out to be completely useless. You’ll get a lot of loot that needs to be identified, by the way.
The items you get can be white, which is shit, green, which is pretty good in some cases, blue, which is better than green, purple, which is part of a set, and orange, which is ridiculously good. It’s a colour scheme that you may recognise from, yes, you guessed it, Diablo. A lot of the items you pick up will be unidentified, as I mentioned earlier. You’ll need to identify these items with an Identify Scroll before you can use them. If you sell them without identifying them, they don’t fetch as much cash. The orange drops are always named, and always awesome. The only issue I’ve had with them is that they don’t seem to drop for the right characters. Luckily there’s a shared stash in which you can place an item, and from that point your other characters have access to them, which is just as well. On my Alchemist, who wields a staff, I got a gun. On my Vanquisher, which is ranged, I got an axe. Can you see where I’m headed with this? It’s all luck of the draw, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
On the subject of classes, there are 3. The Alchemist, which is the closest you’ll get to a mage/necromancer, the Vanquisher which is the ranger/amazon, and the Destroyer, which is your standard warrior type fella.
The Alchemist can cast harmful spells, summon minions, or get into close(r) combat with AoE attacks and the like. I won’t bother explaining the talent trees; if you’ve played any MMO, or indeed any other RPG in the last decade, you’ll know the drill.
The Vanquisher can stand at range and blast away with guns, bows, or crossbows, or my favourite, two pistols. She has the ability to lay down traps, which do some pretty nasty damage if placed right. She can also be equipped with melee weapons and get up close and personal.
The Destroyer runs in with either a 2 hander or a couple of weapons of choice. He gets beaten. A lot. You can equip him with a shield, as well. He has your standard range of strengthening buffs and attacks and so on.
You also get to choose between a dog and a cat as a travelling companion. This pet can learn two spells, which are picked up from merchants or dropped by monsters.
Happily, that leads me onto the issue of equipment and bag space. There isn’t one. You get weapon and armour drops off pretty much anything and everything. A neat feature is your pet, which is a supporting unit in combat. It’s main role for me, however, was to cart around all the grey, worthless armour and other crap until it was time to send him off to sell it. Being able to send your dog or cat off to act as a middleman in selling your gear while you continue on your merry way is a stroke of genius. There’s no excuse for having a full pack, there’s always a way to get rid of unwanted items on the move, and best of all, it saves having to mess about going back to town in the middle of a quest.
Before I discuss the actual gameplay of Torchlight, I need to talk about the graphics. Basically, if you don’t like the way World of Warcraft looks, you will not like them. That sums it up. It looks good, it’s quite atmospheric, but you if you’re looking for realism and attention to detail, you’re barking up the wrong mineshaft. The characters look good enough, but they lack a certain something. The Alchemist looks like he just stepped out of an anime convention, the Vanquisher presumably once worked in the local brothel, and the Destroyer is just… a potato. With legs. With the class description “Destroyer” you’d hope to see someone who looks like he’s going to beat you to death with your own spine, but this just isn’t the case, sadly. That said, the style does suit the game, and doesn’t detract in any way from the enjoyability.
Right. Gameplay. You point and click to move, you have a hotbar for your abilities with hotkeys linked to them, and you aim the cursor where you want your abilities to hit. You have a red bar for health, and blue for mana. Get hit, and you eventually die. Run out of mana and you can only auto-attack. That’s it, really. You get the usual plethora of potions and trainable spells and scrolls and so on. Every now and then you come across a named monster, and if you’ve been paying attention, someone in the town will probably want the monster dead.
Overall, Torchlight is a decent game. It’s a Diablo clone through and through, but it makes no apologies for it, and doesn’t need to. It’s well thought out, the quests and storyline are entertaining, and despite the relatively small world it doesn’t get old fast. For you hardcore nutters out there, there’s an Ironman mode, so if you want to push yourself, you’ll find the game ready and willing to take on the challenge. The only gripe I have is that it’s got no multiplayer, but with a free to play MMO based on the same world coming in a few years, I’m sure you’ll cope. Although exactly how well that will fair against Diablo 3 is anyone’s guess.
So, to conclude. Torchlight: It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it’s Diablo 2.5. It gets old after a while, but that can be said for any game in existence. If I were pressed for a score, I’d give it 8/10.
