Regardless, in my long-standing tradition of playing games well past their popularity spike (I haven’t even reviewed Mass Effect or Bioshock 2, both recently played) I recently picked up Torchlight on the XBox Arcade. From my vague recollections, Torchlight was something like Diablo, but streamlined and graphically updated.
Believe it or not, that’s pretty much it. Well, except the compelling storyline.
Synopsis
So your character (one of three builds) decides for vaguely heroic reasons to hack their way across the world to the small town of Torchlight. It’s a mining town, and they trade mostly in ‘ember.’ Ember is a precious crystal that is imbued with magical powers. Think materia, if you’re from a Final Fantasy background.
Anyways, like the Dwarfs from Lord of the Rings, they miners went too deep, and got too greedy. The end result is that the dark n’ evil things living in the bowels of the earth are now free-roaming. This is obviously bad for business, the town, and probably for the world to some extent. Think of the market spikes!
You roll up into town and take it upon yourself to rid the mines of evil. You also get to rid it of any valuables along the way, which I’m pretty sure is the unspoken rule with heros. A sort of payment in lieu. You button mash your way down through the levels of the mine, getting ever closer to the cause of all the bad…ness. Badness. Yeah, sure let’s just leave that one sitting there.
Gameplay
I have no idea how this plays on a computer (it’s platform of origin) but it plays out pretty smoothly on a console. The controls are simple, and you can customize them to best suit your playing style. Well mostly. Some keys are perma-bound, but it’s not that rough.
So Torchlight does play almost exactly like Diablo, which makes sense given that the team that made it worked on Diablo in the first place. I’d say there was a conflict of interest or stolen IP or something, but I assume Blizzard hasn’t noticed; they’ve been to busy rolling around on their giant piles of money. It takes the same isometric angle, the same horde of monsters approach, the same skill tree system, etc.
Seriously it’s Diablo. If you enjoyed the mechanics of Diablo, you’ll enjoy the mechanics of Torchlight, as there is almost nothing that’s different.
You can gamble, you can socket, you can enchant, you can use town portal scrolls, you have to use identify scrolls, there are level portals you can use to quick travel. The music is even similar (again, same people working on it), so you’ll feel right at home ripping baddies apart.
A lot of effort was put into making the controls as simple as possible for the player. You have a smashy button, a block button, a healing button, and a mana restore button. Every other button can be mapped to whatever you want. This allows you to set up your skill load-outs as needed. On top of that, you can get use the D-pad to swap between loadouts, so that you can have specific setups for specific situations.
Graphics
The graphics are shockingly rich, though given it’s a 3/4ths view game where you can’t really zoom in, I doubt they had to work all that hard on the textures. Regardless, The environments look lush, the enemies match the style of the game, and your character looks reasonably bad-ass. The detail put into the spells and ambient lighting is impressive, I must say. If anything, they probably put more effort into that than the rest of the texture work.
Now that all being said, when you do get to look at your character close-up, they do start to look a bit boxy. For obvious reasons, the poly-count was probably toned back as much as possible. When you start trying to render 20-30 badguys on the screen at once, you really want to try and make that as easy as possible on your rendering engine. Sadly though, it does make parts of the game look cheap.
Music
Have you played Diablo or Diablo 2 at all? If so, you’ll feel right at home in Torchlight. I mean, they got the same guy that did Diablos music to write the score(s?) for Torchlight. While Torchlight does have its own feel in with the music, you can’t help but thing that the composer probably didn’t have to work all that hard to put it together.
Issues
It’s boring.
If you are looking for a deep, driving storyline, you won’t find it here. If you want to feel like a god as you mow down 20 guys at the same time, you’ll have fun. It’s not that it’s boring to play so much as it’s not compelling you to play through it. It really is a game for those who like to grind through levels and power up like mad.
In terms of story… well there is no story really. I honestly didn’t give a toss about anyone or anything in the game, and that includes my little wolf sidekick. There aren’t really other characters, so much as there are NPCs who will shower you with ‘quests’ and gold and such.
It’s easy.
If you spend a couple minutes looking over your skill-tree, you’ll realize that there’s a pretty easy setup that you can go through that will basically make you a god. That’s what I did, and even though I played well past the end of the main story, I only died 2 or 3 times. Those deaths were normally caused by me just not looking at the screen. Which brings me to the other part of this:
All you have to do is button mash. Never have I played a game that rewarded button mashing so much. It’s stupid. What’s worse is that you have to button mash. I’d love to target something and have my character bash the shit out of it until it dies, I die, or I decide to change tactics. I shouldn’t have to ruin 2 buttons on my controller just to play through a game.
Overall
Is it a bad game? No. Was it fun? Yes. Would I play it again with the other characters? Nuh uh. Would I buy it again? probably not. Do I feel like I wasted my money? Nah.
5/10
Sadly, I have to agree with you on most counts here. I got it not long after it first came out and probably haven’t even got halfway through yet. I’m sure I’ll pick it up again and finish it off at some point, but at the moment, I have no compulsion to do so. I think I have a copy of Diablo 2 lying around somewhere that someone gave me, so I might give that a shot instead though.
On the button mashing point, I just want to point out that its slightly different on the PC in that in order to attack all you have to do is hold down LMB and you’ll continuously attack whatever you’ve targeted or, if you’re glued to the spot, in the direction you’re pointing. You’ll probably still end up mashing RMB for whatever spell/ability you’ve got hotkeyed there.
Jeeesh! Diablo 2? Now that brings me back. If you are looking for storyline, that’s the better option. If only the graphics weren’t horribly dated.
I was aware of the variation on the PC, but even that isn’t that much of an improvement. It’s less clicking but you’ll eventually crush your mouse button.