Thursday, March 18, 2010

Torchlight

Not everything that I do is related to xbox. Infact I don't spend much time on it besides playing borderlands. I have recently been playing more games on my computer, and one of the more fun, cheap games is torchlight.

It's on steam for $19.99, if you don't use steam you cannot get this game as it is only sold through steam.

Torchlight is very simmilar diablo, a very successfully action rpg made by Blizzard. In my opinion one of the greatest games around even today. They are finnially working on diablo 3 but it still looks like a year or so away so torchlight makes a great appitizer.

Saying torchlight is simmilar to diablo isn't the right word. Torchlight is a diablo clone, there have been many unseccesfull diablo clones but this one for the most part does things right. It dosent stray far from the diablo formula like so many others do. Everything done from waypoints, town portals and identity scrolls make an appetance in torchlight.

It also adds some new features that improve the way things are played. Alowing you to remove jems from armour and weapon when you get new gear (destorying what was in it), a stash the is comunal for all of you chars. They also improved the spell/ability casting alowing you to map spells to your number bar. Potions also stack so you only need to map one button for mana potions and one for health. Another neat feature is your pet. When you create your char you can choose between a dog and a cat. Your pet aids you in combat, but more importantly can hold extra equipment and then run back to town to sell junk for you, keeping the action going.

Being a diablo player I like to use the two button aproach. Use one spell (generaly basic attack) to left mouse button, and another spell to the right. You then map spells to the f keys to switch out what spell is on right click. Then you can use the mouse wheel to scroll through spells. In torchlight you can do most of that except for using the mouse wheel. Instead you map a secondary spell on your right click and press tab to swap them out. I good idea but it felt odd.

Another slight negative is the level design. It gets quite confusing and the many quests you get don't point you in any sort of direction. When you leave the game it forgets the map you explored so you can end up going backwards.

In terms of story you choose one of the characters, your classic beefy warrior, a scrony male alchemist which fills your caster type, and a woman who only likes to armour her private areas, she plays like an archer/rogue. You arive at a town called torchlight (the oddly enough houses a giant torch in the middle) which happens to have a catacombs that's a hundred levels deep filled with demons (sound fimilliar?). Your goal is to save this mining town going all the way down, (no spoilers here)

One of the huge downsides to the game is the total lack of multiplayer. Multiplayer is one of the things that made diablo so amazing and still keeps it's fan base today. The lack of multiplayer cuts replay value, but it also cuts gold spammer bots jumping into your games!

The game has a nice art style featuring cell shaded characters and envioroments that really works well with the game. For fans of diablo and point and click RPGs, torchlight is a great game to tide you over for your wait of diablo 3. For $20 you can't go wrong even with the lack of multiplayer you will be hacking and slashing through waves of badies for quite a while!!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You need to update us on D3 vs Torchlight!