Torchlight

It’s been a great month for the loot-hungry among you. Borderlands exploded onto the scene with a policy of “Diablo with guns”, meeting with much success in the interim. Now Runic Games – a new team made up of former Blizzard North employees, who worked on the original Diablo – bring us action-RPG Torchlight, successfully modernising many aspects of its spiritual predecessor.

The premise is simple enough. You play as either a Destroyer (warrior), Alchemist (mage) or Vanquisher (ranger) who comes upon the mining community of Torchlight, famous for a rare mineral known as “Ember”, said to empower those who touch it. Naturally, this discovery attracts all sorts of would-be treasure-hunters and academics to the site, hoping to make a name for themselves. When well-meaning Alterac (who looks and sounds something like a poor-man’s Tim Curry) is corrupted by the Ember, the fate of Torchlight – and possibly the world – is put into jeopardy.

This is where you come in. Accepting and completing quests from the mining locals, you have to fight your way through 35 randomly-generated dungeon-floors to the source of the problem, snatching all sorts of rare weapons and armour from the legions of defeated foes, not to mention bagging wads of cash along the way. Combat is very much in the vein of Diablo; left-click on an enemy to attack them, and right-click to activate an offensive or defensive spell. There are hot-keys for mapping mana and health-potions (which you’ll have to juggle carefully when it comes to tougher foes), but you essentially spend a lot of time clicking enemies, clicking loot, and then clicking yourself to apply said loot. You apply skills through a standard ARPG skill-tree, expanding the initial three character classes of the game to a total of nine classes. All of the Diablo trappings are here – town portals, random dungeon traps and the ever time-consuming item identification – while Ember acts as socketable items to enchant your equipment in a variety of ways. At first-glance, it’s all par for the course.

What Runic Games has achieved with Torchlight is to streamline the experience to an almost masterful degree. Everything you need to play and progress is located in the starting area, only a town portal away, negating the need to travel any real distance to upgrade your character. The interface, with its chunky stylised font and helpful shortcuts, is easily-learned by players new and old to this genre. There’s a short tool-tip-based tutorial that kicks off at the beginning of the game which clearly and concisely teaches you everything else you need to know. From then-on you can expect a couple of 3AM nights until you play through the 10-to-15 hours required to beat the game. Replays are encouraged through a retirement system, which allows you to permanently enter your adventurer in a hall of fame in order to bestow suped-up equipment to newer characters.

If Torchlight does have one new trick up its sleeve, it’s the addition of a pet cat or dog to the player party. Besides acting as another line of defence in battle, the pet can also hold its own inventory. Fair enough, no big deal – but wait. In something of a masterstroke, not only can the pet hold these items for you, but at the click of a button it can take them back into town and sell them in your stead. It’s a striking innovative touch, and certainly one I would like to see make its way into other RPGs. The decision is a strategic one, too; as the pet will be gone for up to two minutes, you’d better make sure you’re safe from nearby dungeon threats. If that wasn’t enough, you can equip your pet with trinkets, and even feed it a selection of fish found in dungeon pools, morphing it into other creatures.

An impressive sound-track composed by Blizzard-veteran Matt Uelmen runs alongside the action. It catches just the right balance between catchy and moody, encouraging cautious progress through the game. Graphically, Runic Games has opted to follow the World of Warcraft school of thought and gone for an exaggerated art-style, and in this case it’s far and away the right decision. The character models, although limited in quantity, scream personality. The environments are bold and colourful, boasting a surprisingly tile-set variety. Not only does the game look great in motion, it will run on practically any PC from the last five years; there’s even a netbook toggle under the graphical settings, for those road-warriors among you hoping to sneak a quick game in-between commutes.

If any real criticism can be made towards Torchlight, it is of the slightly unbalanced difficulty of the game. On the default level, the swarms of enemies you face will prove no real threat for a majority of play; in fact, with only minimal Ember-alteration to buff my stats, I didn’t need to keep track of my health until the 10 floors approaching the end-game. Suddenly, things take a bit of a heel-face-turn here, with the last five floors in particular being agonisingly brutal. It’s unfortunate, because the end-game itself also provided some of the most rewarding encounters of the adventure.