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Diablo-Clone Done Right
There are many games out there that fall into the category of the Diablo-Clone, and many of them are not very good. I'm pleased to say, however, that Torchlight does not have that problem. It turns out to not only be a very competent action RPG, but it even does some things to improve on its obvious inspiration.
Torchlight's story is fairly throw-away. There is this stuff called Ember in a mountain next to a town called Torchlight that makes people go crazy but also gives them badass powers. You journey to the bottom of said mountain over 30+ randomly generated floors of monsters with action RPG gameplay we're all familiar with.
This game does a lot of things right. The gameplay is excellent, featuring your typical frenetic click-fest complete with a variety of abilities and three classes. Players can choose from a Warrior, Rogue, or Wizard-type character, each with three different ability trees to assign points to in order to get new abilities. By far my favorite innovation this game brings to the genre is the pet. When making your character, you can choose either a cast or a dog as your pet. They can learn spells, gain levels, and fight alongside you. What makes them amazing, though, is that they have their own backpack, and will even run to town to sell your gear that you don't want and return with the gold a few seconds later. I loved this feature. In most games similar to Torchlight, I always found myself constantly warping back to town every two or three minutes to sell the junk clogging up my pack. In this game, I can just send Fido back to town with my garbage and keep enjoying the combat without punishing myself for not picking up loot.
The graphics in this game are very pleasing to the eye. It has a graphic style that, if it wasn't heavily inspired by the cartoony looks of World of Warcraft, would be one of the biggest coincidences of the year. Not that I'm complaining, mind you; the graphic style gives the game a very positive feel and makes you want to keep going, as well as being very scalable and just looking nice no matter how fancy your video card is.
I did notice a couple problems, however. I sometimes found that the game lost track of my mouse, particularly in heavy combats, which did occasionally cause me to die to things that my character just wouldn't attack no matter how many times I clicked on it. Also, the difficulty seemed to randomly spike about 4 levels before the end of the game, culminating in a final boss battle in which I died and respawned so many times that I stopped counting at 20.
Despite these flaws, though, I still think this is a game worth checking out. It provides a good stop-gap for those waiting for Diablo 3, and for everyone else, its just plain fun.
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System: |
PC
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| Genre: |
Action RPG |
| Experience: |
Finished the game on Normal Difficulty
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