Torchlight

The Good
I liked a lot of things, really. The pet was awesomely implemented. Feeding it fish to transform it into some other creature, sending it to town in order to sell the random items that you previously found, enabling it to cast spells (mine became a summoner basically), everything works fine and is great fun. I think the pet system was the best thing in the game.

I also enjoyed the game as a whole. It was definitely fun. Maybe not as fun as Diablo (hell, Darkstone, another Diablo "clone" was a bit more fun as well), but great fun nonetheless. I'd always find myself going back to hack and slash some more monsters.

The combat felt really good when using the right weapons and skills. I personally enjoyed the Vanquisher; cannons were a blast, and the Vanquisher's offensive skills felt really nice. Especially when you'd throw a fire arrow/ball at a large group of enemies.

Items were varied enough. Out of curiosity, I always tried to get better items. Armors looked really great on the character, which was a plus: thus, I always wanted to get a more awesome armor to put on my vanquisher. Which resulted in me playing more and more, in order to get better drops.

The graphics were great. Amazing, really. I have nothing to complain about here.

The music was nice too, though a bit unnoticeable.

The story was never a strong point for hack and slash games, and Torchlight's story makes no exception. I liked it, but that's because I expected less. It's still just an average storyline though. After all, you're here to kill monsters, right?

The Bad
The targeting system was a bit... no, it was horrible. I made a lot of mistakes because targeting was just too inaccurate. E.g. I had to try very hard to keep on targeting a fast moving enemy. That's just not right in this kind of games.

The game was surprisingly easy on the hardest difficulty setting up until the last 3 or 4 levels. Then it became hard like hell. Thus, the difficulty is quite unbalanced, and hardcore characters will most likely have serious trouble near the end. Mainly because the players might feel like rushing head on thinking the game is still as easy as it was one level before.

Fishing takes a lot of time in this game, and in the end you're left wondering if it's really worth it. At a certain point I continued to fish just to get the achievements done. Fishing takes just too much time, while the pet in its normal form is sufficiently strong to just not feed it any fish at all.

The lack of co-op mode is a real bummer. I would've enjoyed some hacking and slashing with my friends.

The game feels just like a generic hack and slash. It has a story, it has characters, it has its own world, but it has no depth. Whenever I try to remember about Torchlight, the pet comes to mind. Then the items, then the combat, then the graphics. Never a certain quest, nor the characters. A pity, really. I still remember killing the butcher in Diablo 1, and the awesomeness of Harrogath in Diablo 2.

The Bottom Line
A great title to spend your time with if you like hack and slash games. It's definitely not a Diablo killer, it's definitely not an excellent game, but it's worth your time and money if you ask me. If however you're not looking for a recent and good looking game, you might want to try Darkstone. It's a lot more fun, with a slightly better average kind of story, and with more memorable quests. It's also cheaper.

The Good
Very little thought is required to play this game, and there's not a thing wrong with that. Torchlight follows the conventions of the genre set forth by its illustrious predecessors with basically no deviation. Red and blue potions for health and mana, copious amounts of loot with an almost neverending variety of enchantment combinations, constant action and movement, and a completely irrelevant plot.

For some strange reason I enjoy tracking statistics. Torchlight is kind enough to include a journal that tracks a variety of things including number of steps taken, total quantity of gold collected, potions used, spells/skills used, monsters beaten, etc. etc. While this doesn't contribute in any meaningful way to the game, it is mildly interesting to see.

Upon completing the main quest a new area of exploration, The Shadow Vault, is opened. This is from all reports an infinitely deep dungeon. So if you are so inclined you can continue to play and explore this endless and completely randomized dungeon. (The main dungeon is randomized too.)

While I haven't actually done this, you can "gift" selected items to your characters' heirs (new characters). I think this does lend a little towards the replay value, though not much.

This game ran quite well on a two year old system (Core 2 Duo E6850 with a pair of 8800GTS cards). Sound quality was adequate as far as I could tell (I am unfortunately playing with a very substandard set of speakers at present).

The Bad
I did experience a couple of random crash to desktop events, but even these had no real impact as the game saves in realtime. Which ultimately was my only, albeit minor, complaint. There isn't a way to save the game manually. I've long been a firm believer in the theory of "save early, save often" and while I didn't have to worry about it here, I was unable to save, test equipment changes, and reload if I didn't like it. As I said though, that's a minor complaint as there's always better loot and lots of it.

The Bottom Line
Just like the other games I've played in this genre (Titan Quest, Sacred, Dungeon Siege) this game is both narrow and shallow. I played the demo a few weeks ago and it intrigued me enough to be worth dropping a 20$ on it. And I have no real complaints with it. The developers did a good job of creating something new enough to intrigue, but not so new as to require anything even resembling a learning curve to play. I played the heck out of it for about two weeks (as much heck as I can spare anyway, with real-life in the mix) but I don't see much longevity in it. There is an editor included with the game, and I've seen that there are already a few mods either released or in the works. But even still.... this is the gaming equivalent of a summer action flick; great fun while you're playing but who's going to remember it next year?

The Good
What is presented here is presented well.

The Bad
I couldn't get into Fate or Torchlight due to their lack of plot and I prefer a more mature visual style. It is a very simple formula...go into the mines, kill all the enemies, gather all the loot, and return to the surface...rinse and repeat.

The Bottom Line
If you prefer a colorful, cute, cartoonish art style and just want to kill enemies and gather loot then you will probably like this game (and its twin, Fate).

The elements missing from Torchlight which made Diablo II one of the best games ever made, are:

1. Cinematic cut-scenes: In Diablo II these were the best! They were artistic, meaningful introductions to the next section of the plot. There are none in Torchlight.

2. Atmosphere: The atmosphere fit the genre. Sound effects, colors, musical score all combined to create a mood. These aspects are too cute in Torchlight. It is pretty and well made, I just do not like the artistic style..

3. Plot: Torchlight's plot is barely there. It took two elements from Diablo, the endless fighting and the plethora of loot with special item upgrades. Diablo II actually had a plot with elements of horror, mystery, and even some humor. In Torchlight, it is just go, kill, gather, sell.

The Good
At the start of the game you can choose a pet which will be your companion. Aside from just acting as a cut pet they can also be used to go back to the surface to sell items you have collected. I really liked this because this is one of those games where every fight gives you at least two new weapons and most of them are useless, so instead of going back to sell them yourself you can explore the dungeon further while your pet does all the annoying work. Just be sure to give them a fish afterwards.

The Bad
This is one of the rare games where I get lost before all the tutorials are done and lose interest before figuring out what I did wrong. I was ordered to go back into a dungeon and find a location on the Third floor. Once I got back to the right floor I just started looking for it, but everything looked exactly the same and I ended up walking in circles without noticing. I also had a quest that told me to go a library, but never quite told me where the library was, there were a lot of quests that did this and it just left me confused and annoyed after just two hours of gameplay.

When you want to fight in this game you need to click on your opponent, when you want to walk in this game you need to click on the floor. This would be alright if the enemies weren't constantly moving around, but sadly they do. I have fought at least fifty groups of enemies and every single one of them was an uncontrollable mess. You want to hit an enemy, but you end up walking towards him instead. It's also annoying when you want to cast spells because it just ignored my commands half the time. You would think this means the fighting is hard, but no, there is no challenge to this. Once the enemies stand still you just hold down the button until they die and sometimes you use a potion to keep yourself alive.

It has the same problem as Borderlands where it just feels like the game takes 1% from another game and tried to present it as its own, in this case World of Warcraft. The graphics were pretty much identical aside from a lack of light (might have been my gamma settings); you have the same interface and everything is presented the same way. It's very odd to say the least, but World of Warcraft was a really entertaining game, so you'd think a rip-off of this magnitude would be slightly entertaining, right? The answer is "no".

The writing is deliberately kept simple, so the game can focus on the action, but this is a solution I can only respect so many times. When Borderlands did it, I cheered for it and I did the same for Portal, but by now it just starts to feel like the developers are lazy. I buy a game because I want an interactive story, I don't like it when I put a disc in my computer and discover that only the interaction is inside though. One last thing: please stop teasing us with cut-scenes and dialogue, if you don't want to tell a decent story you shouldn't have to interrupt the interaction with this kind of stuff.

My final complaint is that the town is very small and there is only one, you do practically no travelling around the main world and spend most of your time in the copy & pasted dungeons instead. This made me really sad because I have to agree that underground caverns aren't that interesting and there is little to no variety in there, but in other RPG's we at least get to visit some other places like castles or meadows. It's kind of funny how the town is so dark though, it makes it feel like you're still under the ground.

The Bottom Line
I tried to came up with positive things to talk about here, but I just stared at the "good" section of this review for ten minutes before giving up and mentioning the kitty you can have as a pet. I wanted to mention the graphics, but then I remembered that was the same as World of Warcraft, I wanted to mention the combat, but remembered it wasn't challenging. In short: This game wasn't worth my time or 2.97 EUR at all.

Maybe I am just spoiled and I need to accept that not every game has a well-written story or functional controls, maybe I also should come to terms with the fact that not every game can come up with its own graphics style or interface. If I have to recommend this game to somebody, it would probably be the fans of Diablo and similar games, I warn everybody to either stay clear of this game or buy it for somebody you really hate.