Torchlight - the review.
Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 1:10 pm
Torchlight is a new ARPG (read, hack n' slash) created by Runic Games (ex-Blizzard north team, creaters of Diablo II and Mythos and Fate). It plays like a 10-year old game of the same genre. Out of every game of the genre that I've played, it reminds me the most of DarkStone, and fuck, that game was great back in the day.
Before I continue, let me say one thing: THIS GAME HAS NO MULTIPLAYER. IT IS EXCLUSIVELY SINGLE PLAYER ONLY [size=x-small](but an MMO is in production). What the fuck is it with that?[/size]
I don't really know how to start reviewing this game. You choose one class out of the three available: Vanquisher (Amazon), Destroyer (Barbarian) and Alchemist (Necromancer, but really seems a lot like Witch Doctor out of D3) and the game puts you in the town of Torchlight (music is a mix between Tristram [d1] and Rogue Encampment [d2]). The main quest immediately picks up and you are sent on your way to the first level.
The dungeon system is a mix between Diablo I with the waypoint (here called waygate) option from Diablo II. There is no "open world" and different acts like in Diablo II, you are always stuck in the one town. You enter the mines outside the city and activate a waygate every 5 levels that lets you get quick access and saves you from trekking all through it again.
This review will drag because I am going to individually discuss all the gameplay elements, so if interested, just scroll down to the relevant bold title. If you don't care about the individual game elements, then press CNTR + W or just scroll down to the end for a few final words and verdict.
Difficulty:
Torchlight is easy. As simple as that. In the beginning of the game, you pick your difficulty, Easy (bonus experience), Normal, Hard (tougher enemies) and Very Hard (tougher enemies and more damage). I finished the game on Normal and quite frankly, it was way too easy. When/If I start a new character, definately go for Very Hard and I recommend everyone here to do the same.
It is said that you can change difficulty through the console in the next patch without being labelled a cheater.
There is also a Hardcore option, which is the same that it was in D2.
Quests:
Torchlight in this sense feels more like an ARPG than say, even Diablo II, it's an endless dungeon crawler. Main quest has you hunting down this one dude, with a little cutscene or change in scenery every 5 dungeon levels. There's one guy who gives you a quest to get him embers (basically, find another ember every 3 levels or so) and a singing robot bard that (quite nifty actually) that sings songs of your achievments, thus he asks you to kill a rare every 2-3 levels or so. Essentially, these sidequests add nothing besides another source for a little more experience or fame, you'd still be crawling your way through the same dungeon.
There is one more guy who opens up extra dungeons and asks you to retrieve shit from them, they are generally a bit more challenging but add nothing besides another source for gold, experience and fame, so why bother and just not go to another level of the main dungeon? Essentially, they are there in case you are lacking experience for the main quest, but the game is easy anyway.
After you finish the main quest, another set of dungeons opens up with more sidequest creation. This is basically an endless set of dungeons with and endless set of side quests for you to crawl through, until you reach maximum level (100), thus instead of respawning monsters a la Diablo II, it creates an unlimited number of levels or random content for you. Not bad, if you're into that kind of thing.
Combat:
Torchlight has here tried to improve on what failed a little in D2 - too much character specialization in Single Player. Whereas a Smiter was awesome for taking down bosses, it absolutely failed at tackling the hordes sent at you en masse and made him a slow grinder and progresser.
In Torchlight, all classes have AoE skills which are acquired very early on and make progression very fast, so you do not end up stuck, beating one monster. Skills are used in the same way as D2, you bind a skill under each mouse button and let it rip. It should also be mentioned that projectile weapons (bows, guns) do not require arrows or bullets, which is very nice.
Dungeon creation is random, so your map is created every time you enter a new level, however unlike in D2, monsters do not respawn and maps remain explored.
You can purchase maps to "lost dungeons" from vendors, which basically create a portal to a random 2 level dungeon and you can explore it for loot and experience. Great if you are behind with experience for the main quest.
The game also creates rare monsters which give you extra experience and fame. The gain is substantial, so it is worth exploring the level to hunt them down and their drops are good.
Death:
When you die, you are prompted with 3 options - pay a penalty in fame, experience and gold and resurrect immediately, pay a penalty in gold and resurrect at start of level or pay no penalty and resurrect in town. Works quite well.
Stats:
Torchlight has 4 different stats:
-Strength: more melee damage, also a requirement for some heavier armors and melee weapons.
-Dexterity: more ranged damage, requirement for ranged weapons.
-Magic: more magic damage from spells, more ranged damage from wands
-Defence: more mitigation, also a requirement for armors. This is different from Diablo II. In Diablo II, defence gave you less chance to be hit, the direct opposite from Attack Rating. Instead, it works a bit like Damage Reduction from D2. In Torchlight, items have armor values, which directly mitigates damage. The Defence stat increases the mitigation from your armor.
In all honesty, the game is too forgiving for you to really care about this. On my Vanquisher, I ended up pumping 95% of all stats into Dexterity for more damage. I suspect that it will be Strength for the Destoryer and Magic for the Alchemist, with a few tribute points into Defence to wear better armor.
Leveling up is more normalized than it was in D2 (1-87 in 1h, and about 4-5h per levelup in early 90s, with heavy incremental increase). In Torchlight, you get levels at the same time rate, avarage of 1 level per 1.5/2 dungon floors.
Maximum level is 100.
Skills:
Skill trees work like in Diablo II, except that skill prerequisites don't exist, they only have level requirements. You get skill points via leveling and fame. Say at level 30, you have access to all skills and you can invest points in them regardless whether you have any prior points in that tree or not. This allows for more specialization and it means that you won't have to waste 5 points to get the skill that you actually want. Not bad. There are 3 trees, like in Diablo 2. For the vanquisher, one tree is for bows (like Bows trees from D2), 2nd tree is for traps (like Trap assassin in D2) and the 3rd tree is for melee combat (akin to Rogue in WoW).
Fame:
Every time you complete a quest or kill a rare monster, you get Fame points. I haven't played Fate, but apparently the mechanic is similar. Fame is like a 2nd experience bar, every time it fills up you reach a new level of being famous and acquire a skill point. It's quite nice and gives you that extra incentive to hunt down rare monsters. Maximum fame level is 45 I believe.
Pet:
This is perhaps one of the most useful gameplay additions in this kind of game. When you create your character, you can pick a pet (cat or dog) that helps you in combat and carries items for you. You can also equip him with some simple jewelry (Amulet + 2xRings) and 2 spells (explained in own section). The key thing is that he's got a large inventory that you can load up. You can then send him to town and he vendors everything that he carries, returns after 2 minutes and gives you the gold. This mechanic is great because it practically eliminates the need for going to town and you can also pick everything up to maximize your gold gain. Gold is good in Torchlight.
Retire:
You can retire a character if you are sick of him after finishing the main quest, basically deleting him. What this does is that your next character gets an extra skill point and also "inherits" one item from the character, which then has its stats increased. You can inherit one item many times and its stats will keep on improving until a certain extent.
Spells:
You can find several spells in the game which are kept in the seperate spells tab. You can then learn up to 4 spells that you can use at any time, at the cost of mana. This mechanic is essentially dependant on whether you will find the spells or not, since their drop is random. You keep upgrading them, so eventually you'll be using Fireball V as opposed to I. I don't know how useful they are since killing is not a problem anyway and I never used any spells.
If you are sick of your spells, you can unlearn them, but the initial scroll is consumed and you'll need to find another scroll if you want to relearn.
Shared stash:
Besides your personal stash (like in D2), you also have a shared stash, basically a way of giving items to your other characters. Nifty. Softcore and Hardcore stashes are seperate, however I believe that they are the same regardless of difficulty.
Different vendors in town:
Torchlight has a number of vendors with different purposes in town, their essential purpose, besides vendoring is the replacement of the Horadric Cube.
Gem retrieval is done by two goblins. Gems in items work exactly the same way as it did in Diablo II and follow exactly the same pattern (except that it takes 2 gems to transmute to next level as opposed to 3). Unlike in Diablo II, gems are actually very valuable and top level ones are tough to get. So you've got two goblins, one will destroy your item and return your gem, the other one will destroy the gems and return the item.
Transmuter: this guy is the basic Horadric cube, look for recipes. He combines gems and all that jazz.
Gambler: same as in D2 essentially, although there are minor differences. Thus far, I've found gambling to be rewarding, but not so much at later levels when you're already geared.
Enchanter: this guy is key to itemization. I will discuss this later under the itemization heading.
Itemization:
Drops work very much like they did in Diablo II. Everyone can use any weapon and any armor as long as they've got the necessary stats for it. Green is magical, blue is rare, golden is unique and purple is set. However, here comes the annoying bit. Remember how in Diablo II, loads of shit always dropped and most of it was garbage. So in a Hell Chaos Sanctuary run, you'd maybe pick up 2-3 items max and normally vendor those as well. Rest was garbage that you didn't give a shit about because gold was basically irrelevant. However, in Torchlight, gold is very much needed and even though drops aren't as plentiful as they are in D2, there's still a lot, so you spend a lot of time picking up garbage, essentially the same loot that you'd have found since level 1 of the dungeon, giving it to your pet and vendoring it for money. A lot of shit drops, so you really just have to pause, identify all the garbage and then give it to your pet to vendor. I guess it's better than just leaving it, but I'd personally like to see more of a flat gear progression element like in WoW, level 80 green drops have far superior stats to level 1 greens and sell for different amounts of money. You naturally get more gold for higher level items here as well, but picking up another green, identifying it and realizing that it just gives +1 of another useless stat and then selling it gets a bit tedious.
Next thing that I'm unhappy about is how much stats have been dumbed down. There are far less stats in the game, i.e. there are no real minute "fun" ones like in D2 (+ light radius - and hey it was useful!). Essentially, all that you get on gear are +base stats, +res%, +life/mana, +%dmg. It gets a bit boring and especially in the early game, it really just means not picking the one that you give less fuck about. It also means that once you get your item that has the stat that you really want (in my case, I loved +life and +dex), you can end up using that piece for a very long time. Especially due to Enchanting.
Enchanting is key in this game, but it's also something that feels quite gamebreaking. There's a vendor in town that can enchant an item for you for a fee, which can result in one of these 4 results:
-he adds sockets
-he adds magical attributes or improves previous ones
-nothing happens
-he fucks up and removes all enchantments on the item (fairly rare)
So what this means is that you can just bring your level 1 white helmet to the guy and reenchant it for all the money that you have and use it until the end of the game. It is not a bad use of gold. It is fairly expensive and the main money drain in this game, but there's a fine line to cross - you can find a good bow and use all the gold that you've gathered over past 3 hours to make it amazing. You then go to the next dungeon and find a slightly better base bow that would potentially give better stats if you spent 50k enchanting it. You can enchant all items, green, set, rare or unique, but for some of them the fees are really high. The enchanting aspect can really be game breaking, because what it essentially means is that whatever you are picking up is only for gold purposes that use to improve your current gear. And obviously you can get the kind of situation when you've spent 20 minutes clearing 2 levels, finally come back to town, enchant your bow and the enchant fails - nothing happens. Can be frustrating, but potentially very powerful.
The Verdict:
Torchlight has its flaws, but it's the best game in its genre to have come out in a long time, quite akin to Diablo II to be honest. Obviously, a severe problem is the lack of multiplayer, but if you're the individual grinder type, this is not a major issue. I've played many games of this genre and there are very few that I've played for longer than a day or so. Torchlight bored me at first (as did Diablo II) but I've got into it and am about to start a new character now. As far as dungeon-crawlers go, this is about as good as it gets. It's only £15 so even if you don't like it, it's not a massive waste. The game's only been out for a few days (but it's relatively bugfree, nothing game breaking for me thus far), so the next major determiner of success is going to be how and how soon the developers are going to patch the bugs and provide new content. If you liked Diablo II, give Torchlight a chance.
I'd give it an 8/10, but due to the lack of multiplayer, it gets 7/10.
Before I continue, let me say one thing: THIS GAME HAS NO MULTIPLAYER. IT IS EXCLUSIVELY SINGLE PLAYER ONLY [size=x-small](but an MMO is in production). What the fuck is it with that?[/size]
I don't really know how to start reviewing this game. You choose one class out of the three available: Vanquisher (Amazon), Destroyer (Barbarian) and Alchemist (Necromancer, but really seems a lot like Witch Doctor out of D3) and the game puts you in the town of Torchlight (music is a mix between Tristram [d1] and Rogue Encampment [d2]). The main quest immediately picks up and you are sent on your way to the first level.
The dungeon system is a mix between Diablo I with the waypoint (here called waygate) option from Diablo II. There is no "open world" and different acts like in Diablo II, you are always stuck in the one town. You enter the mines outside the city and activate a waygate every 5 levels that lets you get quick access and saves you from trekking all through it again.
This review will drag because I am going to individually discuss all the gameplay elements, so if interested, just scroll down to the relevant bold title. If you don't care about the individual game elements, then press CNTR + W or just scroll down to the end for a few final words and verdict.
Difficulty:
Torchlight is easy. As simple as that. In the beginning of the game, you pick your difficulty, Easy (bonus experience), Normal, Hard (tougher enemies) and Very Hard (tougher enemies and more damage). I finished the game on Normal and quite frankly, it was way too easy. When/If I start a new character, definately go for Very Hard and I recommend everyone here to do the same.
It is said that you can change difficulty through the console in the next patch without being labelled a cheater.
There is also a Hardcore option, which is the same that it was in D2.
Quests:
Torchlight in this sense feels more like an ARPG than say, even Diablo II, it's an endless dungeon crawler. Main quest has you hunting down this one dude, with a little cutscene or change in scenery every 5 dungeon levels. There's one guy who gives you a quest to get him embers (basically, find another ember every 3 levels or so) and a singing robot bard that (quite nifty actually) that sings songs of your achievments, thus he asks you to kill a rare every 2-3 levels or so. Essentially, these sidequests add nothing besides another source for a little more experience or fame, you'd still be crawling your way through the same dungeon.
There is one more guy who opens up extra dungeons and asks you to retrieve shit from them, they are generally a bit more challenging but add nothing besides another source for gold, experience and fame, so why bother and just not go to another level of the main dungeon? Essentially, they are there in case you are lacking experience for the main quest, but the game is easy anyway.
After you finish the main quest, another set of dungeons opens up with more sidequest creation. This is basically an endless set of dungeons with and endless set of side quests for you to crawl through, until you reach maximum level (100), thus instead of respawning monsters a la Diablo II, it creates an unlimited number of levels or random content for you. Not bad, if you're into that kind of thing.
Combat:
Torchlight has here tried to improve on what failed a little in D2 - too much character specialization in Single Player. Whereas a Smiter was awesome for taking down bosses, it absolutely failed at tackling the hordes sent at you en masse and made him a slow grinder and progresser.
In Torchlight, all classes have AoE skills which are acquired very early on and make progression very fast, so you do not end up stuck, beating one monster. Skills are used in the same way as D2, you bind a skill under each mouse button and let it rip. It should also be mentioned that projectile weapons (bows, guns) do not require arrows or bullets, which is very nice.
Dungeon creation is random, so your map is created every time you enter a new level, however unlike in D2, monsters do not respawn and maps remain explored.
You can purchase maps to "lost dungeons" from vendors, which basically create a portal to a random 2 level dungeon and you can explore it for loot and experience. Great if you are behind with experience for the main quest.
The game also creates rare monsters which give you extra experience and fame. The gain is substantial, so it is worth exploring the level to hunt them down and their drops are good.
Death:
When you die, you are prompted with 3 options - pay a penalty in fame, experience and gold and resurrect immediately, pay a penalty in gold and resurrect at start of level or pay no penalty and resurrect in town. Works quite well.
Stats:
Torchlight has 4 different stats:
-Strength: more melee damage, also a requirement for some heavier armors and melee weapons.
-Dexterity: more ranged damage, requirement for ranged weapons.
-Magic: more magic damage from spells, more ranged damage from wands
-Defence: more mitigation, also a requirement for armors. This is different from Diablo II. In Diablo II, defence gave you less chance to be hit, the direct opposite from Attack Rating. Instead, it works a bit like Damage Reduction from D2. In Torchlight, items have armor values, which directly mitigates damage. The Defence stat increases the mitigation from your armor.
In all honesty, the game is too forgiving for you to really care about this. On my Vanquisher, I ended up pumping 95% of all stats into Dexterity for more damage. I suspect that it will be Strength for the Destoryer and Magic for the Alchemist, with a few tribute points into Defence to wear better armor.
Leveling up is more normalized than it was in D2 (1-87 in 1h, and about 4-5h per levelup in early 90s, with heavy incremental increase). In Torchlight, you get levels at the same time rate, avarage of 1 level per 1.5/2 dungon floors.
Maximum level is 100.
Skills:
Skill trees work like in Diablo II, except that skill prerequisites don't exist, they only have level requirements. You get skill points via leveling and fame. Say at level 30, you have access to all skills and you can invest points in them regardless whether you have any prior points in that tree or not. This allows for more specialization and it means that you won't have to waste 5 points to get the skill that you actually want. Not bad. There are 3 trees, like in Diablo 2. For the vanquisher, one tree is for bows (like Bows trees from D2), 2nd tree is for traps (like Trap assassin in D2) and the 3rd tree is for melee combat (akin to Rogue in WoW).
Fame:
Every time you complete a quest or kill a rare monster, you get Fame points. I haven't played Fate, but apparently the mechanic is similar. Fame is like a 2nd experience bar, every time it fills up you reach a new level of being famous and acquire a skill point. It's quite nice and gives you that extra incentive to hunt down rare monsters. Maximum fame level is 45 I believe.
Pet:
This is perhaps one of the most useful gameplay additions in this kind of game. When you create your character, you can pick a pet (cat or dog) that helps you in combat and carries items for you. You can also equip him with some simple jewelry (Amulet + 2xRings) and 2 spells (explained in own section). The key thing is that he's got a large inventory that you can load up. You can then send him to town and he vendors everything that he carries, returns after 2 minutes and gives you the gold. This mechanic is great because it practically eliminates the need for going to town and you can also pick everything up to maximize your gold gain. Gold is good in Torchlight.
Retire:
You can retire a character if you are sick of him after finishing the main quest, basically deleting him. What this does is that your next character gets an extra skill point and also "inherits" one item from the character, which then has its stats increased. You can inherit one item many times and its stats will keep on improving until a certain extent.
Spells:
You can find several spells in the game which are kept in the seperate spells tab. You can then learn up to 4 spells that you can use at any time, at the cost of mana. This mechanic is essentially dependant on whether you will find the spells or not, since their drop is random. You keep upgrading them, so eventually you'll be using Fireball V as opposed to I. I don't know how useful they are since killing is not a problem anyway and I never used any spells.
If you are sick of your spells, you can unlearn them, but the initial scroll is consumed and you'll need to find another scroll if you want to relearn.
Shared stash:
Besides your personal stash (like in D2), you also have a shared stash, basically a way of giving items to your other characters. Nifty. Softcore and Hardcore stashes are seperate, however I believe that they are the same regardless of difficulty.
Different vendors in town:
Torchlight has a number of vendors with different purposes in town, their essential purpose, besides vendoring is the replacement of the Horadric Cube.
Gem retrieval is done by two goblins. Gems in items work exactly the same way as it did in Diablo II and follow exactly the same pattern (except that it takes 2 gems to transmute to next level as opposed to 3). Unlike in Diablo II, gems are actually very valuable and top level ones are tough to get. So you've got two goblins, one will destroy your item and return your gem, the other one will destroy the gems and return the item.
Transmuter: this guy is the basic Horadric cube, look for recipes. He combines gems and all that jazz.
Gambler: same as in D2 essentially, although there are minor differences. Thus far, I've found gambling to be rewarding, but not so much at later levels when you're already geared.
Enchanter: this guy is key to itemization. I will discuss this later under the itemization heading.
Itemization:
Drops work very much like they did in Diablo II. Everyone can use any weapon and any armor as long as they've got the necessary stats for it. Green is magical, blue is rare, golden is unique and purple is set. However, here comes the annoying bit. Remember how in Diablo II, loads of shit always dropped and most of it was garbage. So in a Hell Chaos Sanctuary run, you'd maybe pick up 2-3 items max and normally vendor those as well. Rest was garbage that you didn't give a shit about because gold was basically irrelevant. However, in Torchlight, gold is very much needed and even though drops aren't as plentiful as they are in D2, there's still a lot, so you spend a lot of time picking up garbage, essentially the same loot that you'd have found since level 1 of the dungeon, giving it to your pet and vendoring it for money. A lot of shit drops, so you really just have to pause, identify all the garbage and then give it to your pet to vendor. I guess it's better than just leaving it, but I'd personally like to see more of a flat gear progression element like in WoW, level 80 green drops have far superior stats to level 1 greens and sell for different amounts of money. You naturally get more gold for higher level items here as well, but picking up another green, identifying it and realizing that it just gives +1 of another useless stat and then selling it gets a bit tedious.
Next thing that I'm unhappy about is how much stats have been dumbed down. There are far less stats in the game, i.e. there are no real minute "fun" ones like in D2 (+ light radius - and hey it was useful!). Essentially, all that you get on gear are +base stats, +res%, +life/mana, +%dmg. It gets a bit boring and especially in the early game, it really just means not picking the one that you give less fuck about. It also means that once you get your item that has the stat that you really want (in my case, I loved +life and +dex), you can end up using that piece for a very long time. Especially due to Enchanting.
Enchanting is key in this game, but it's also something that feels quite gamebreaking. There's a vendor in town that can enchant an item for you for a fee, which can result in one of these 4 results:
-he adds sockets
-he adds magical attributes or improves previous ones
-nothing happens
-he fucks up and removes all enchantments on the item (fairly rare)
So what this means is that you can just bring your level 1 white helmet to the guy and reenchant it for all the money that you have and use it until the end of the game. It is not a bad use of gold. It is fairly expensive and the main money drain in this game, but there's a fine line to cross - you can find a good bow and use all the gold that you've gathered over past 3 hours to make it amazing. You then go to the next dungeon and find a slightly better base bow that would potentially give better stats if you spent 50k enchanting it. You can enchant all items, green, set, rare or unique, but for some of them the fees are really high. The enchanting aspect can really be game breaking, because what it essentially means is that whatever you are picking up is only for gold purposes that use to improve your current gear. And obviously you can get the kind of situation when you've spent 20 minutes clearing 2 levels, finally come back to town, enchant your bow and the enchant fails - nothing happens. Can be frustrating, but potentially very powerful.
The Verdict:
Torchlight has its flaws, but it's the best game in its genre to have come out in a long time, quite akin to Diablo II to be honest. Obviously, a severe problem is the lack of multiplayer, but if you're the individual grinder type, this is not a major issue. I've played many games of this genre and there are very few that I've played for longer than a day or so. Torchlight bored me at first (as did Diablo II) but I've got into it and am about to start a new character now. As far as dungeon-crawlers go, this is about as good as it gets. It's only £15 so even if you don't like it, it's not a massive waste. The game's only been out for a few days (but it's relatively bugfree, nothing game breaking for me thus far), so the next major determiner of success is going to be how and how soon the developers are going to patch the bugs and provide new content. If you liked Diablo II, give Torchlight a chance.
I'd give it an 8/10, but due to the lack of multiplayer, it gets 7/10.
