Torchlight was designed and developed partly by the team who brought us the original Diablo and Fate games—and that heritage is strong and easily found within the experience. Just as in Diablo, players choose from three base characters who each have their own skill tree, and proceed through a series of increasingly more difficult random environments. However, not all of the game’s similarities with its ancestry are due to the development team. Many of these features are now standard in the genre, which was defined by Diablo. These aspects would need to be present in any dungeon crawl, no matter who made it. Breaking the mold that these very folks made nearly 15 years ago would be almost unthinkable.
That’s not a critique of the game. I—and many like me—have been waiting for a new Diablo game for many years, playing Diablo II over and over again. It’s a good thing for us that it’s one of the most replayable video games ever made. Diablo III not only appears to still be very far away, but seems less and less like the Diablo I’ve loved each time I read something new about it.
The title screen
Pursuit
The plot is, of course, the area where this game diverges most from its heritage. In the small mining town of Torchlight, something evil has taken residence beneath the surface. Deep under the mines, something is causing the Ember (a precious stone) to have an evil influence over the native creatures. The player’s character is sent to investigate, and after starting to become infected herself, must see the investigation through or suffer the evil influence of the mines.
The town of Torchlight
This investigation includes descending floor by floor beneath the mountain, through ancient caves, haunted graveyards, infested and ruinous garden cities, magic-filled libraries, Dwarven fortresses, and so on. Each area has its own enemy sub-types and beautiful graphics sets, and of course, every level is randomly assembled. It’s even difficult to see right away what pieces the levels are constructed from, something which is usually pretty obvious in any game with random levels.
In addition to the main plot line, there are several sub-plots which require the player to complete basic objectives for the other characters in the small town. These take the form of repeatable tasks which become more difficult as the game progresses. In this way, there are a lot of quests to be done, but none of the side quests really get in the way of the main quest, and few of them even pull the player away from the main storyline for more than a few seconds if done in the right order. This simplification of the questing model might make the plot seem less rich than other games, but it may add something to the replayability of the game, since many players stop caring about the plot after the first play through a dungeon crawl anyway.
Most quests are fairly basic
The three characters are the standard Fighter, Mage, and Ranger choices that one would expect, each with three areas of expertise that one can choose their skills from, becoming as specialized or as broadly focused as one wishes within the class. For example, the ranger—my favorite class—can specialize as a distance fighter, a small weapons dervish type, a trap-setter, or she can take a few skills here and there from each specialization.
The character creation screen
Each character gets to choose between a dog or a cat for a pet. As far as I can tell, there is no difference between the two, other than visual preference. There are, however, lots of fish in the game. Your character earns fish by completing a simple fishing mini-game at various points in the dungeon, each of which gives the pet a different bonus or transformation which can last from 6 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the catch. The pet can also be equipped with two rings, two spell scrolls and an amulet, and in this way one can customize the animal to fill whatever role the player needs.
This pet has been transformed with an electric eel
Panorama
The fun art style can be best described as “bright crystal steampunk”. Lots of gears and brass make the whole thing look very Victorian/robotic, but at the same time there is not the absence of other colors that usually characterizes that style. The colors are crisp and not too vibrant.The engine itself has greatly scalable graphics. It even has a specific “Netbook Mode” designed to be optimized for computers with low GPU power and smaller screens, a feature that we might begin to see more of as netbooks become more and more popular. However, the engine might not be as optimized as it could be at the other end of the scaling spectrum. It doesn’t play well at all for me on its highest setting, and I have a GeForce 9600 GT. While not top of the line anymore, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Of course, everyone’s experience will be different in this regard.
There are many different types of environments to adventure through
As one would perhaps expect, the camera is overhead isometric, and has some zoom controls, but no rotation. To get a better look at the graphics style, check out the exploration video:
Noise
The thing that ties this game most closely to its spiritual predecessor is the music. The songs are not identical, but the style of the music—that sort of Celtic lilt mixed with the occasional sitar—is so similar that if I get up and leave the room while Torchlight is running, I could swear that someone nearby is playing Diablo.
The voice acting is hit-or-miss. The NPCs are full of one-liners which they use to greet and depart from the player, so you’ll end up hearing the same lines over and over again in town. Some of them are will get a bit old (The item transformer guy will say “Luck has smiled on you” in a creepy voice every time you successfully combine items, which is not only inaccurate, since luck has nothing to do with item recipies, but if you end up combining a lot of potions through out the game, you hear it a few times to often). A couple of them are clever (I laugh every time I finish dealing with the blacksmith and he says, indignantly “It’s not a skirt!”, referring to his blacksmith’s apron), but most of them eventually just fade into the background. There are a few characters with longer dialog sequences, and these are mostly fall flat, like being read from a novel in a high school English class. These are so few and far between, however that it doesn’t really detract from the game as a whole.
Reigns
If you wish, you may control the game entirely with the mouse, using the fairly standard heads-up UI. On the bottom of the screen sits a large health and mana display surrounded by a quick-bar and menu buttons. Of course, all of these buttons have their corresponding keyboard shortcuts. The key I used most frequently was the Shift key, as it allows one to remain in place while fighting, to keep the avatar from walking around accidentally when you want him to be fighting. Personally, I prefer to have separate buttons for movement and attack in a dungeon crawl, so that I don’t need to use such a modifier, but the controls were not customizable to that level. In fact, the only thing about the controls that could be customized was the mouse sensitivity, so if you have a particular configuration you like to use for this type of game (I like to map the first and second slots to ‘Z’ znd ‘X’ and put my potions in those slots, for example) don’t count on being able to use it here.
The mini-map is pretty standard fare. It automatically updates as you explore, and can be set up in the corner, or set to overlay the entire screen transparently. It contains very little detail, however: There are icons for the PC and NPCs, and a line drawing to indicate the shapes of the passages and rooms—but beyond that: nothing. A few times it became a little unclear. While the floors are always shown as a shaded area, the walls do not always show as solid, so if you’re looking for something on the level, trying to use the mini-map to figure out where you’ve yet to visit can be a bit confusing. You may have to run back and visit areas which look like new passages, but which are merely odd spots in the map.
Dungeoneering
Item management is fairly simple. There are basically two ways that a game in this genre can handle inventories: one item per slot or a constant Tetris-esque item puzzle. Torchlight opted for the former, and I think it’s better for it. Selling the items is also made easier, as the character is not required to return to town each time his inventory is full. He can, instead, give the unneeded items to his pet, and have the pet run back to town and sell them for him. The pet doesn’t take a commission on the sales, but the player does have to do without his companion for a length of time which increases as the player descends deeper into the mountain, and which can be decreased by certain skills later in the game.
Encoding
I probably need to upgrade my RAM, so I wont put too fine a point on this, but load times between levels were inordinately long for me. I would use the time to go grab a beverage, and the level would sometimes still not be ready for me.
Last Word
If you enjoy dungeon crawls and don’t mind playing alone, Torchlight will potentially absorb you for hundreds of hours, while at the same time being very easy to pick up and drop at weird intervals—even with days in between sessions. The easiest way to describe the game in a nutshell is that it’s “Diablo I with modern graphics”, but that phrase doesn’t really do justice to the many modernizations that were squeezed in alongside the graphics. That appeal, combined with the progressive pricing and distribution ($20 on steam) makes this game a must-have for every dungeon crawler. Below, I’ve included a brief video exploring the game interface and pointing out some of the things that I’ve discussed here.
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