Ramblings of an alcohol soaked geek.

So Torchlight is one of those little project’s you hope will do well even though you think that it is going to get destroyed by a bigger AAA title on the horizon (in this case Diablo 3). I think Perfect worlds knew this and that is why they split the project up into two parts, the first a single player only action-RPG where all of the unnecessary stuff has been scaled back to introduce you to the world and the style of the gameplay and the second a all encompassing “MMO” that keep the style and gameplay mechanics of the single player but add’s many new areas and a Shared “over-world”. I’ve been playing the single player game for a while now so here is what I think.

First thing is first, this game is pretty but it doesn’t do it by using fancy new shader effects or anything like that, this game is so low maintenance it runs perfectly fine on EEE PC’s in fact the settings menu has a special “netbook mode” button to auto adjust the game to running on small cheap computers like these. The basics of the game are very simple some mysterious force has drawn you and a few others to the small mining town of Torchlight and odd things are afoot in the mines and you being the awesome hero you so obviously are get asked by the locals to help them out with a series of quests to help rid this town of the evil blight.The gameplay mechanics are simple yet effective left click is move/attack/open depending on what you click and right-click is your currently selected special skill, you can have 2 skill assigned to right-click which can be cycled through with the key, that’s just one of the small things Runic have done with this interface that makes this game such a joy to play. And of course this team that consists of some of the original creators of Diablo wouldn’t make a dungeon crawler without giving you randomly generated dungeons, plenty of different types of loot, a wide variety of enemies as well as big bosses to fight. There is also one extra thing Torchlight gives you and that is a pet, an ever loyal companion who will attack with you hold some items for you as well (and this is the bit I love) load itself up with all of the items you don’t want to keep and run off back to Torchlight to sell them for you before coming back with the gold 30 seconds later, quite how a dog or cat manages to commune with the shopkeepers is never discussed.

It’s fairly obvious to see that I love this game and if Diablo 3 has anywhere near the level of quality and polish that this game does we are in for one hell of a treat but I think I will still end up replaying Torchlight more, simply because it runs on my EEE without problems and there is simply no way on this Earth that Diablo is going to match that feat. It’s not without it’s flaws however, in the teams dedication to getting it to run flawlessly on low end hardware they have created a few issues, if you do have a faster computer apart from cranking the res up the game doesn’t optimise itself very well, loading screens take a good few seconds to pass and for a game of this size that simply shouldn’t happen and it is simply because the game engine is not asking anything of the computer and works through things at it’s own pace. Anyway that is enough rambling from me for now other than to say that the TorchEd mod tools & a mac version of the game are on there way and by all accounts the TorchEd environment is meant to offer stunning levels of customisation. Grab a copy of this game, it’s only $19.95 and provides an easy 10-20 hours of gameplay just for one play through and you will be playing itthrough more than once of that I can guarantee*.

*Guarantee is no way an actual guarantee.