Most people measure the passage of time in years or by major life milestones. But a small minority - myself included - measure the passage of time in terms of how many more cold and lonely nights it will be until Diablo III is released. If you find yourself in this second category, Torchlight may just be the game for you. This dungeon-crawler bears more than just a passing resemblance to the Diablo games, which should come as no surprise: The developer of Torchlight, Runic Games, was co-founded by two of the key founders from Diablo's own Blizzard North.
When you begin the game, you must first choose your character. There are only three options: the destroyer (warrior), the alchemist (wizard) and vanquisher (ranger). While these are not the most imaginative class types, especially for anyone who plays a lot of role playing games, they serve their purpose well enough and provide adequate incentive for replaying the game. A lynx or wolf sidekick accompanies your character for the duration of your journey, aiding you in battle and making trips back to town to sell off items while you keep adventuring. This particular feature endears itself to you very quickly, as it is a well-established fact that stopping mid-quest to go sell piles of junk to a vendor is one of the most annoying parts of any game with a limited inventory.
Torchlight takes place in a small mining town that just so happens to be situated directly above a massive randomly generated multi-level dungeon. The town itself is called Torchlight and contains within it your usual staples of the hack-and-slash RPG genre, including vendors, quest-givers and sagely old non-player characters who offer advice. The town is not particularly exciting, but the dungeons beneath it are well-constructed and the randomization means that you never know what is going to be around the next corner.
Gameplay in Torchlight will be instantly familiar to fans of the Diablo games, but for the uninitiated, here's the skinny: Your character hacks and slashes their way through hordes of enemies in an effort to gain more experience and acquire better weapons and equipment. When you have gained enough experience points to level up, you invest in new skills and abilities so that you can kill stronger enemies and get better items. You repeat this process again and again until you have beaten the game. As boring as that sounds on paper, it is a proven formula that has been addicting gamers everywhere for decades.
The art style for Torchlight is even more cartoonish than World of Warcraft, and as such, keeps the game from ever feeling too serious. This is not a good or bad thing, but it does somewhat inhibit the player from becoming emotionally invested in the game. The nicest thing about Torchlight visually is the top-down perspective that will make any Diablo fan feel instantly at home. Arguably the best feature of the game is the fantastic music, which was composed by Matt Uelmen, the composer responsible for creating the memorable soundtracks in the Diablo games.
Unfortunately, Torchlight has a fair number of flaws that keep it from being a great game. In addition to the mediocre plot and the generic character classes, the quality of the items you find - a key feature in a game like this - seems to be sub-par. I found so many useless swords and bows that were defined as "rare" or "unique" that the words lost all meaning. Additionally, Torchlight does not allow for the remapping of keys which, as a lefty, can be a deal-breaker.
The takeaway: Although Torchlight tries to capture the magic of Diablo, it only partially succeeds. It gets some things wrong but it gets enough right that I can comfortably recommend it, especially at the bargain price of $20. Torchlight may just be one of the better ways to kill a few of those hours standing in between you and Diablo III.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
