Torchlight

Torchlight

Digital box - World - 1st edition.

Developer Runic Games Publisher Runic Games Published 2009-10-27 Platforms Linux, Macintosh, Windows, Xbox 360 Genres Dungeon crawler, Role-playing game Themes Action, Fantasy, Steampunk Series Torchlight Multiplayer Simultaneous co-op Distribution Commercial

Torchlight is an action role-playing video game with a fantasy steampunk theme developed and published by Runic Games on 2009-10-27 for Windows and then ported to several other platforms. The game was created by several people who created the first two Diablo games, and was designed to be very similar to them. It is the first game in the Torchlight series.

In the game's story, a town has sprung up around a mine after a valuable magical ore called ember was discovered. However, the ember appears to be corrupting people's minds and spawning monsters, and in the deep caves, miners have uncovered the ancient ruins of a long-forgotten civilization. As the player investigates, they learn that an ancient evil is being held captive deep underground, and the only scholar who knows about it has become corrupted by the ember and is actively trying to release the evil.

Personal

Own?	Yes. On Steam.
Won?	Yes. Normal difficulty.
Finished	2022-12-26.

After replaying the original Diablo for the umpteenth time, I was eager to finally try Diablo II. I had some old discs of it, but, I kept running into problems trying to get it running on Windows 10. I remembered that Torchlight was built to be very similar to Diablo II, and I had it in my Steam library, so I gave it a shot. While it kept me busy, I wasn't very impressed.

Review

5	5	8	5	4

Best Version: Windows

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The dungeon environments look fantastic, and the visual effects for spells and special abilities look wonderful.
• The pet is an invaluable NPC. You can equip it with rings and amulets, you can give it spells, and it can carry inventory to be sent back to town while you keep fighting. I love that you can give it buffing spells which makes it less likely that you'll forget to cast them yourself.
• The music, though mostly ambience, is well composed for the game.
• I like that the game auto-saves to prevent save scumming.
• There are a wide variety of special abilities for each class which allow for a variety of play styles.
• The developers released an editor to allow players to mod the game.

Bad

• Buying new equipment is painful because there is so much junk. About 95% of the inventory is above your level, above your stat requirements, for other classes, or considerably worse than what you already have.
• A large portion of the game is menial busy work: you kill an enemy, it drops an unidentified item, you identify it, discover it's useless, bring it back to town and sell it. Wash, rinse, repeat.
• All the of the quests are boring. Each of Vasman's are, "bring me this pointless item that appears on level X," each of Trill-Bot 4000's are "kill a miniboss on level X." Neither requires you to do anything out of the ordinary. Each of Hatch's quests are "clear an additional dungeon level and bring me the useless item at the end." For all quests, the reward is always very unimpressive; a tiny amount of gold, and an under-powered item.
• The art style is hokey. All the items and many of the characters are fantasy and steampunk caricatures.
• The difficulty is poorly calibrated. I played the game at normal difficulty and found it so easy, I didn't come close to dying until level 30. So, up until that point, I found it to be rather dull.
• The dungeon graphics are mostly useless window dressing. This is not only a bit distracting, but makes it harder to know when you've missed an area of the map. There will be sections where it certainly looks like you can get to them, but you can't. The auto-map won't show them, which helps you know they can't be reached, but the auto-map also doesn't show staircases and secret rooms, so you will never know for sure if an area you see can be entered or not.
• The interface at the bottom of the screen gets in the way whenever you're moving south or trying to target a southern enemy.
• Because the dungeon structures aren't random, you'll end up playing through the same maps multiple times in a single play-through. This felt awfully boring.
• Simply adding levels to enemies to make them more powerful isn't thematic. A rotting zombie should never be far more powerful than an enormous troll no matter what level it is.
• When using ranged weapons from an elevated position (like on stairs), you won't walk fully into range before firing and will miss. This is quite annoying and requires manual movement.
• The voice acting is sub-par.
• Having the narrator tell you when you've triggered a trap doesn't make much sense.
• The ballistas in the prison levels are always pointed at the player, so, by the time you kill the enemies and reach them, you end up shooting into an empty room.
• The game strangely doesn't support multi-player, not even co-op. Not a big deal for me, since I wouldn't have played it that way anyway, but, for a game like this, co-op isn't that difficult to implement.

Ugly

• The game is a shameless clone of Diablo II. While this isn't such a bad thing, since Diablo II was a great game, it's a letdown. Why bother playing this game when you could just play Diablo II instead with it's more memorable characters and better story line? Also, the majority of the design flaws from Diablo II were carried over as well without much attempt at fixing them.
• The story is not interesting. A person you've never met has become evil due to a corrupting mineral ore and another person you've never met is trying to thwart them? Meh. Compare that to Diablo where you're trying to stop a horde of hell's demons from taking over the world, and it's not even a contest.

Media

Box Art

• 

  Digital box. Used by publisher and various online sources.

• 

  Title card - Steam.

Video

Longplay - Windows - Destroyer.

Representation

Strong female character?	Pass	The Vanquisher is a heroine and Syl is a useful ally (despite briefly being a damsel in distress).
Bechdel test?	Pass	If you play as the Vanquisher, you occasionally talk with Syl about your quest.
Strong person of color character?	Pass	The Destroyer is a hero and black.
Queer character?	Fail	As far as I can tell, there are no queer characters.

Technical

In Windows, your save game information is stored at C:\Users\User Name\AppData\Roaming\runic games\torchlight.

Links

         

• torchlight.fandom.com/wiki/Torchlight_Wiki - Torchlight Wiki.