First Impression: Torchlight
Published on December 27, 2009
With some extra time over the holiday, I was looking for a new game to play and decided to look into Torchlight. My first impression when researching the game and looking at the screenshots was that it appeared to be a more cartoonish Diablo. Having now played for a few hours, I can say that this impression is correct.
As with my experience with the Diablo series, Torchlight offers a lot of fun with single player dungeon crawling. The first few levels have felt less frantic than I remember Diablo being and I’m not convinced this is a good thing: it seems I am having the most fun when a flood of enemies comes pouring out of the wall. The game has also been much, much less dark. It’s been quite a long time now but I remember actually being a little freaked out playing those first few levels of the original Diablo in those dark dungeons.
I do like some differences the game has introduced such as pets and the (sort of) uniqueness of the classes. The specializations of the classes add a lot of variety and the skill trees allow for variety even among the same class. For example, you wouldn’t normally see a mage class (Alchemist here) specializing in melee combat but it’s a viable option in Torchlight.
Overall the game is really solid and fun and more than a few ideas have made their way from the Diablo series to this game (not a bad thing). There are some things which appear to be missing, such as online play and depth in character creation but you come into it looking for a fun hack-and-slasher, you won’t be let down.
This isn’t something I would normally post about but I found out that by using Steam I could get the game for $5 and I wanted to pass that along. Unfortunately, in the last 12 hours, the game price has gone up to $10. I think I must have (by accident) purchased the game on the last day of a holiday sale. Still, even at $10 the game is way underpriced. It appears the game will be priced this way through January 4th, at which I believe the price will go back up to the $20 range.
While the game isn’t perfect, if you’re looking for a fun game to play, I don’t think you could get more for your money than this.
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