Torchlight, PC – Review

02/12/2009 in Reviews

Torchlight, PC – £12.35

Review by – TychoCelchuuu

Do you like clicking? Do you like loot? Do you like putting skill points into skills? If you’ve answered yes to these three questions, you’re either pining for Diablo III or you’ve done the sensible thing and purchased Torchlight to tide you over. The brazenness with which Torchlight rips off the Diablo series would be criminal if it wasn’t so cute. This game plays like a refinement and a distillation of the classic hack and slash, and the only thing that hasn’t been pinched from Diablo is its violent, gothic tone. Instead, Torchlight has wholly appropriated World of Warcraft’s cheery stylized visuals, which means you will spend hours clicking on and picking up town portal scrolls from skeletons with endearingly large heads that you’ve smashed with bright, glowing swords.

Torchlight has few aspirations, but for the price and for its goals, it succeeds wildly. Diablo is about three things: clicking on a monster until it is time to click on the next monster, picking up increasingly ridiculous things like giant axes from increasingly deadly things like dragon men, and watching your level tick inexorably towards the point where you can rough up Zeus. If you thought Diablo was anything other than this Torchlight has proven you wrong, because that is all there is to Torchlight. And brother, let me tell you, Torchlight is good.

A Diablo clone stands or falls on the strength behind the clicks. Swing a mace into a monster for a kill, and you’d better feel it, if not deep within your chest then at least at the tip of your index finger. Torchlight delivers in spades, with meaty sounding hits, a screen that rumbles when you roll a critical, and waves of enemies to slaughter in what would be a completely horrifying manner if the enemies showed even the slightest ability to do anything other than run directly at you in a murderous rage. A hack and slash can have as many tricks up its sleeve or flaws in its façade as it wants, but if the clicking doesn’t fly, the rest is just empty.

Torchlight manages to coast for a long distance on the strength of its clicks. The game is appallingly primitive in some aspects. Missing are the ragdoll physics that make it so enjoyable to smash a skeleton in Titan Quest, or the multiplayer that allows you to duel a friend or swap items in Diablo. Torchlight doesn’t even get its stupendously simple formula down pat. Item statistics quickly become confusing, making it hard to tell which sword one ought to wield; identifying items must be done one scroll at a time; to heal up in town you need to purchase your own potions, and so on. It’s not so much a case of rough edges as it is rough insides. The game feels as smooth as a baby seal, but as you run your hands over it, it twists and turns in ways you thought would be fixed by now, almost a decade after Diablo II. It does, of course, make up for it by letting you club pretty much everything except a baby seal, but it’s inexcusable that something as simple as reassigning skill points if you’ve made a mistake needs to be handled by a mod.

Mods, though, are Torchlight’s chief strength beyond its almost preternatural ability to imitate Diablo well. Torchlight is stupendously modifiable, and already there are worthwhile changes to the game that can be applied through the simple process of unzipping a folder into another folder hidden in a third folder that is buried in your Windows installation. And they sometimes break your game. But not very often! These modifications go a long way towards curing many of the niggling details that ought to have been fixed in the first place, and there will only be more as time goes on.

Torchlight is an easy choice. Diablo good? Torchlight good. Diablo bad? Get off my Internet. That verdict could have saved you the trouble of reading this review, but if you’ve made it this far, you are perhaps worried about the lack of multiplayer. How fun is it, really, to spend hours alone, clicking on things in a quest to be able to click on more difficult things? I say, plenty fun, but you could always stick a podcast on to fill the lack of chatter.

A final note: the last boss? Complete bullshit. He has more hitpoints than the sky has stars, and it will take you the better part of a month spent holding down your mouse button to even make a dent in his health pool. You have been forewarned.