Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Just plain fun"

If you ever imagined a fuse between Diablo 2 and Fate – well you got it – it is called Torchlight. The game starts to what I think should be now a must factor for all start menus – background that reflects your environment – and oddly no introductory video. From then on it is pretty simple: 3 classes, background story but nevertheless an interesting one, and some heavy dungeon crawling.

Now back to my initial reference to Fate and Diablo 2. The Fate element is going to be pretty obvious 10 minutes into the game: there is that big (and I mean really big) mine it the town of Torchlight and you got to get to the bottom of it – quite literally – as there is something down there that is causing a lot of trouble. The player travels with a pet – either a mountain cat or a wolf that has its own inventory including the possibility to wear items such as medallions or rings and can travel to town to sell unwanted goods to vendors. Also the character gains Fame and rises in the eye of people – which is a nice touch cause it creates a sense of development but aside a skill point that one would earn at each Fame level – there is not Fable-esque relationship to the people of Torchlight. As for the Diablo part – Torchlight creates a specific feel to itself that reminds of Act 1 of Blizzard's title. The guitar music constantly going in the background, the dark-ish theme and more mature look to the weapons, enemies and companions than in Fate for example creates a very strong sense of Déjà Vu to the player. This feel is reduced once the player sets foot in the mines of Torchlight as the environments are quite varied and the solid action and treasure hunting quickly sucks the player in. Besides – the game is made from the guys who made Diablo in the first place so I leave it to the players to decide whether the similarities are a good or a bad thing.

The game-play itself is pretty standard hack-and-slash RPG to the point of the game simply having one default button scheme that the developers assumed that everyone will be using anyway. To the newcomers of the genre there is no training other than a help screen highlighting what is what on the HUD and which buttons to use. Being a true H&S action game don't expect any sophisticated puzzles just pure hack-and-slash fun. Killing monsters, looting and expanding on the gear and skills is all you will do – and of course there is always the slight feel of repetition but in my opinion this is quickly overcome by the desire to get even more ways to kill monsters out of your character. Another little moan of mine is that the send-to-town feature of the pet kind of loses its usefulness as the player has to make regular stops to the vendor to buy potions – whether it is health potions or mana potions to power the Heal spell – the trip has to be made.
Speaking of characters though the game offers only 3 classes: Destroyer (melee class); Alchemist (mage class) and Vanquisher (ranged class) don't be fooled in thinking that it lacks customisation. Each class has 3 specific skill pathways offering specialisation in certain aspects of the chosen profession. The fun part is that the player can mix-and-match whichever skills he fancies out of the 3 pathways thus creating his own unique experience. The skills are roughly 30 per class and they all feel very powerful and create some nice flashy animations on screen but there is a downside to all this goodness. Out of these 30 skills roughly one third are the same for all 3 classes – for example Armour Proficiency or Offensive Magic focus are available to everyone – and also some of these common skills feel a bit useless in compare to the class specific ones that the player has at his disposal.

Magic also has a questionable use in the game. That being said – there is a difference between the skills of the mage class – that are essentially magic skills, and Magic meaning different spells that one can buy from the shop and imbue into his character. The latter of those acts as described – and can be used regardless of what the player class is. Aside from spells like Town Portal and Identify – which are extremely useful as the Recession hits even this game if one goes berserk in the shops - other ones such as Summon Zombie kind of feel useless in comparison again to what the skill selection can offer.

There are plenty of side-quests to be performed and those do return some decent profits in terms of cash, items and Fame and thankfully these quests are about right in terms of time-consumption and engagement as leaning towards too short and meaningless or too long and distracting can be an annoying thing in such games. Also there are plenty of achievements in the Steam edition to keep one occupied for quite a long time. The lack of multi-player is a surprising omission but me being ultimately a single-player oriented gamer did not feel this too much.

With all this said and done all that is left is for me is to suggest finding, and having fun with this game. It is of great quality and will appeal to veterans as well as newcomers for variety of reasons and really there is no point to touch on all of them: I will let the players discover and enjoy them as they please.