Late last week, at a time when I should have been awfully busy wrapped up in work, I somehow felt compelled to game. As I had neglected my gaming addiction for some time by this point, it didn’t take much mental persuasion, and I quickly chose to shun my responsibilities, turning instead to my fairly extensive collection of games that I have, as of yet, failed to play. My gaming list of shame, if you will. Following a quick scan of the list, I picked my poison, donned my wizard’s robe and hat, and bravely ventured into the realm of Torchlight for the first time. With my trusty canine companion, Max, barking enthusiastically at my side, I began to quest. And then I quested some more. And it was good.
Hours past, and it was only at the point where my stomach grumbled for the umpteenth time, and my mouth was inexcusably dry, that I realised for quite how long I had been lost in this immersive world. But the deep, expansive mines and dungeons beneath Torchlight were addictive; I wanted more, and after a quick food break to sustain myself, I was firmly glued back in the hot seat. More hours passed, and as I continued to delve deeper into the loose storyline, I experienced firsthand the interesting gameplay mechanics that Torchlight has to offer.
You see, Torchlight takes the bread and butter of a dungeon crawler title, and then builds upon it. For example, my faithful canine friend is not only combat effective, but also has the unique ability to double up as an aspiring salesman (or is that salesdog? If so – I’m coining the phrase now!) whom I can dispatch to town burdened with my ill-gotten wares, safe in the knowledge that he will return minutes later, his pockets laden with gold. This is a feature that I never really thought of as essential to Video Games such as this, until Torchlight showed me the error of my ways. With the need to return to town every fifteen minutes now extinguished for good, and also the feverish scouring for town portal scrolls no longer a necessity, the previously difficult decisions surrounding what items to discard in order to create room in my inventory vanished immediately.
And it is for this reason that Torchlight appears, at first glance, to have hit the metaphorical ‘dungeon crawler’ nail firmly on the head.
Given its considerable success though, perhaps what it is most remarkable about Torchlight is how I have only just come to play it. For those of you who have equally spent the past few years under a rock, Torchlight is an unashamedly self publicised and incredibly fresh looking Diablo 2.5. Released back in 2009 to act as a comfortable stop gap between the rapidly ageing Diablo 2, and the perpetually pushed back Diablo 3, Torchlight is fun, approachable and simplistic – and to begin with, there’s nothing wrong with this.
Almost every avenue of this game has been simplified, including the class system. Gone are the ten or so predetermined classes found in the likes of Diablo, and instead they’ve been replaced by a mere three: the stereotypical brutish damage dealer, the ranged based assassin type and the gleefully weak spellcaster. Contrary to my usual preference of shooting things from afar (akin to the ‘ranger’ mentality) this time round I opted for a spellcaster, who I then turned into a badass necromancer chap by the terrifying, fear-mongering name of ‘Frank’. I know, scary huh.
Sadly, for the same reasons I initially liked Frank, it was not long until I began to loathe him. Following the first few hours traversing the intricate network of mines underneath Torchlight town, Frank’s quickly trained skills of summoning were warmly welcomed, and made levelling up a breeze. I’m now a conservative ten hours into the game though, and the small army that Frank can summon with the mere twitch of his little finger and a quick fist bump with God himself, has made my role in this game rather obsolete. I’m not longer required to help contribute to damage, or to mop up the excess foes with a quick spell blast, because my minion horde can do it all – and in half the time, too. Frank, and myself with him, have become little more than spectators to the carnage, unwittingly demoted to the rank of ‘loot collector’ whilst the many summoned forces at work nip from one group of enemies to the other, dispatching them in record time.
And this is a bit of a shame. Perhaps this issue could have been alleviated if I had of chosen a higher difficulty setting than ‘hard’, but I was lured into the false sense of illusion that ‘hard’ would in fact mean ‘hard’ or at least ‘difficult’. I would have even accepted ‘troublesome’, and anyway, somehow I doubt it would have made any noticeable difference. Instead, the very simplistic nature of Torchlight (which I fondly defended a mere three paragraphs ago) quickly became its undoing. Not once, in ten solid hours, did I find myself anywhere close to the grasp of death, and even the use of health potions proved to be an infrequent affair. I did not witness the untimely demise of my pet, either.
All in all I find this a little odd, considering that in true dungeon crawler style, Torchlight even offers a ‘Hardcore Mode’, which fans of the Diablo series will remember makes the inconvenience of death permanent – i.e. you had better make it a good one, because you only get one take. Yet I suppose in Torchlight’s defence, I only sampled the spellcaster class tree; however I should imagine that the same level of simplicity and a distinct ‘lack of death’ would apply to all the other classes, albeit with more clicking required.
Sadly there are other issues that plague Torchlight, too. For a game that performs amicably well on my laptop, the load times are borderline ridiculous. Perhaps this issue is restricted to my hardware alone, but a brief search in Google would suggest otherwise. There are also numerous bugs that riddle the combat. Summoned minions and foes alike have a nasty tendency to get stuck behind objects, and on more than one occasion I was able to defeat a particularly aggressive boss by standing on a higher level and firing at him mercilessly, as he ran repeatedly at the wall trying to reach me via the most direct route. Although initially humorous, issues like this are more of a pressing matter when combined with the sheer difficulty associated with actually dying in this game, and between the two I am now fairly certain that I could never willingly allow my character to do so. Not once, not ever. And this is a problem for me, because the risk associated with failure makes point-and-click based action-rpg’s appealing and addictive. Without the potential for death, I am merely a willing participant to little more than an interactive film, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not what I expected, certainly not what I signed up for and clearly not what the developers had in mind either.
I also felt an overwhelming urge to blast through this game at full speed. Despite offering a sprawling network of mines, dungeons and (on the odd occasion) portals to explore, something about Torchlight focussed my attention towards blitzing through the levels. I barely stopped for long enough to pick up the abundance of loot that littered the floor, let alone to discover an alternative pathway to the finish, and I no doubt missed out on a great deal of extra content by acting in this fashion. However I don’t feel wholly responsible, as Torchlight’s simplistic nature and relatively infrequent presentation of fresh quests does not lend itself willingly to exploration. Instead this notion is replaced with the hopes of future quests, once you’ve pressed a little deeper, and this unpleasant mistake in the rather important delivery of fresh content within an RPG could be attributed to the lack of a detailed storyline. As mentioned previously, the background surrounding the town of Torchlight is loose at best, and in all honesty even though I’m a number of hours into the game, I’ve still no real understanding as to why I’m doing all this. Who created this large vertical network of caves? And why am I here?
The choice to go action heaving and storyline light though is a surprisingly good fit nonetheless. I only pondered the answers to my previous questions for a moment, before shrugging and returning to the action. I don’t know the true meaning behind my activities in Torchlight, and something tells me that I never will, but that’s okay. I don’t need to know in order to have fun or to feel like I’m enjoying myself – and this is a refreshing break from the Diablo mould, which forces a storyline down your throat so far that you begin to gag in retaliation.
Torchlight is a game that evidently doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is refreshing in part, yet it is this over-casual nature that ultimately lets the game down. Intelligent AI, a wider range of quests to help further inspire dungeon exploration and a little fine tuning on the ‘easy-mode’ wouldn’t go a miss here – and it is for these reasons that this game does not achieve the classic dungeon crawler status that it ultimately deserved.
Torchlight is fun though, despite these flaws, and for the price you could do far worse.
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