Torchlight review

Scantily-clad girl, big ugly guy, scrawny little guy. Yep, itsa RPG!

Welcome, dear RPG traveller, to the town of Tristram.  Shit, sorry, I meant Trinsic.  No, that’s wrong too.  Better compose myself.  Right, got it!  Welcome, dear RPG traveller, to the town of Torchlight.

Torchlight is a top-down action RPG from Runic Games.  You start by picking a character from either the destroyer (warrior), vanquisher (rogue) or alchemist (mage) classes.  Then you choose a pet (cat, dog or “invisible pet”*) and you’re off adventuring!   Torchlight is a remote mining town, and there’s something shifty going on inside it’s mineral rich caverns.  You’re given the job of finding out what that might be.

Control of the game is straightforward.  If you want to walk somewhere, you left click there.  If you want to kill something, you left click on it until it dies.  If you want to cast a spell, you right click on the spot you want to cast it.  Numerical shortcuts can be set for potions, spells and abilities too so in no time at all you’ll be wading through paths of dead critters.

Your pet helps you out a little in combat and in other ways that we’ll get to in a bit.  During your adventures you’ll pick up fairly standard bits and pieces of kit – better weapons, armour and items.  The game is set in some kind of gunpowder age so in addition to swords, axes and bows you also get to play with ye olde style pistols and muskets.

The inventory system will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s played a game like … say … Diablo.  The socket system that allows you to insert gems into items to give them additional powers will also be familiar to people who’ve played … well, Diablo.  And the spell you cast that summons a portal to take you back to the town from whatever level of the mine you happen to be in at the time (a spell called, naturally enough, “town portal”) reminds me of a game I’ve played before too but I can’t seem to remember which one.

There’s a skill tree pulled straight from Diablo.  There’s the game viewpoint and interface, which looks and feels very Diablo and there’s the random level generation system which I think (and don’t quote me on this last one) Diablo might have come up with a few years ago.

I feel like I've seen this inventory screen before...

Despite all this, for a little while I couldn’t help but feel that there was something missing from the game, something obvious that had been overlooked.  But soon enough I found it, sitting right there on the skills tree: a little thing called frost pilum.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the reincarnation of the bone spear.

That’s right.  Runic, the game’s developers, weren’t content to copy the inventory system, socketing, random level generation and even the fucking item naming conventions** from Diablo.  No, they went right ahead and copied everybody’s favourite spell too.  I’m surprised they didn’t just call it bone spear and be done with it – it was obviously too big a temptation to resist for town portals.

Even the parts of the game that haven’t been taken wholesale from Diablo make no real attempts to hide their roots.  The character classes and stats are so run-of-the-mill RPG that I guess we can forgive Runic for just going with what everyone knows.  Having an animal run along next to you is very World of Warcraft though, even if you can’t jump on for a ride.

But the one that really made me laugh was this: maybe I’m showing my age here, but I still remember the Ultima series and a particular enemy it had called a mimic.  It was a treasure chest with teeth that would attack you if you came near it.  Guess what Torchlight has?  That’s right, treasure chests with teeth.  And guess what they’re called?  Full points, you know exactly where I’m going with this.  It’s a small thing, and there’s a remote chance the developers didn’t even know they were doing this.  Still, it made me laugh and sigh in dismay simultaneously, which is no mean feat.

At least it's a pretty game

Maybe I could forgive all this cliché and borderline copyright infringement if the game had a decent story.  But it doesn’t.  The premise about the mine turning people evil is a wafer thin excuse for exploring the mine and killing some rat-men. There isn’t even a proper intro sequence or anything and the voice acting (and even the explanatory text, for that matter) has been distributed so frugally that it doesn’t make up for its absence.

Side quests don’t help matters.  Someone in the village will give you a task of the “find this item” or “kill this monster” variety, send you on your way with instructions to come back for a reward when you’re done.  You go get the item / kill the monster, return, get your reward… and then the same person asks you to do the exact same fucking thing again, only this time it’s an item / monster with a different name that’s two levels further down the mine than the previous goal.

The game does have a couple of redeeming features.  There’s also a shared stash chest in the town where, I assume, you can dump stuff that can be picked up by other characters you’ve created.  I couldn’t bring myself to create more than one character so I didn’t bother using it, but assuming it works it’s a nice touch.

We're in a town, there's a portal...

I also really liked the pet inventory and sell-off system, whereby you can load up your pet with all the crap you’ve picked up, click a button and it runs back to the town to sell everything off while you stay in the mine and continue on your merry way.  A minute later your pet will return with gold coins, having divested itself of all your useless shite.  Don’t ask me how it managed to haggle the best price from the shopkeepers.

Of course if you do a little reading, you’ll discover that another Diablo clone (Fate, developed by Wild Tangent in 2005) came up with this feature five years ago.  Keep reading and you’ll discover that Torchlight’s lead developer was also the lead developer on Fate and much of the rest of the Runic development team also worked at Blizzard North on the Diablo games.

For those interested an MMO version of the game has been announced and it’s expected to be a free of charge add-on. The game has also been designed with modding in mind – anyone so-inclined can download the TorchED editing software for free and mod away to their heart’s content.

Torchlight isn’t a bad game.  Not really.  It’s just painfully cliché, there’s almost nothing about it that wasn’t already being done better ten or more years ago and the fact that the staff at Runic are largely ripping off their own work at previous employers doesn’t really excuse any of it.  In summary, Torchlight made me meh.  Hard.

The Verdict:

Pros: The graphics are decent, there are a few well thought-out features and at least the developers had the good sense to bring Bone Spear along when they copied everything else in the Diablo template.  Oh, and no-one can deny that it’s slapped with a very wallet-friendly pricetag.

Cons: The plot is paper-thin, the missions are repetitive and if you haven’t drowned in cliché by the time you’ve completed the first couple of levels you’re a better swimmer than I.

Overview: This is Diablo without the demons, pure and simple, and the fact that it’s probably one of the better clones in the genre doesn’t really impress me. It’s a medium-volume “meh” from me. 1.5 out of 5.

* Seriously. Runic don’t even try to justify that one. It’s pretty much just an admission from the developers to the effect that “we know the noises your pet makes can get fucking annoying, but not having a pet kinda breaks the game so here’s our clever work-around”.

** “Clouded Dildo of Punishment”, “Freezing Leather Boots of Tinea”, you get the idea…