Picking Up Steam: Torchlight (PC)

Torchlight seems like an action role-playing game made to appeal to two very different types of players. On one side is the long-time Diablo fan who will recognize the familiar gameplay format of Torchlight immediately and might play it for a bit of change of pace from their usual. On the other side are players who have not even played this type of top-down, loot focused RPG before. It might sound like design choices meant for one would make it incompatible for the other, but Torchlight has smart ideas about scope and complexity that make it work well for a range of player types.

 

Torchlight is the name of the mining town you’ll find yourself in once you start the game. A mine for a magical substance called Ember has become too dangerous for its people to continue their work, and you very quickly discover that the Ember holds a darker secret. While it can be used for spell-casting and enchantment, it contains a corruptive influence that has turned the alchemist Alric towards a mad quest to dive deeper below where the Ember only grows more dangerous and powerful. Your character has already been tainted by the Ember as well, the quest not only to stop Alric from unleashing something sinister but also so you can return to a normal life after. However, the plot of Torchlight, save for moments where Alric describes his growing corruption in journal entries you find between new underground regions, is rather thin and mostly concerned with just setting up a reason for your quest rather than telling a tale. Torchlight is primarily about losing yourself in the hack-and-slash action, accruing loot and gaining levels before swinging back to town frequently to sell items and pick up small side-quests.

Torchlight offers you the choice of three characters to play as, each specializing in different fighting styles. The burly Destroyer is inclined towards fighting up close and personal, the type to favor melee weapons. The Vanquisher favors fighting from afar, proving adept with guns and bows while also having various helpful traps. The last of the three, the Alchemist, is the spell caster, not only casting Ember-fueled magic but having summons as part of his skill set as well. Despite each of the three having a clearly favored fighting style, Torchlight will not lock you into only using the weapons and tools that suit them, but the different skills they learn as they level up are usually designed to complement their expected styles. However, as you level up and spend your ability points, you can invest them in a variety of ways, each character having three separate skill trees you can invest in as you please. The Destroyer unsurprisingly has a lot of offensive skills or ones that help him power through being in the middle of the action for example, but you can also invest in his Spectral skill tree for useful spells that can cover some of his weaknesses. This also means picking your hero isn’t necessarily a commitment to playing the game only one way, especially since you are also able to learn certain spells independent of your class’s skill tree so a Vanquisher can also become a summoner or you can give the Destroyer some support options like disabling enemy skills or increasing your magical power before casting a powerful attack.

 

Gradually honing your character into the type of fighter you want to be ends up the core of Torchlight’s progression, this also manifesting through the constant collection of loot across the adventure. Defeating enemies, opening treasure chests, or coming across secret areas in the somewhat randomly generated dungeon floors can potentially grant you new equipment on top of things like gold for spending in town or the health and mana potions that are abundant enough to keep you alive and in the action outside of the tougher or more overwhelming encounters. The gear you find will sometimes just be a stronger weapon or piece of armor at times, but a good deal of gear will also come with enchantments already applied, especially if it’s of a higher rarity or is a special unique find. You’ll find plenty of gear that you won’t care to use, most of it best sold off, but that means even the bad stuff has a bit of value and the truly useful finds have a special air to them that makes for an exciting break from the norm. You can use resources back in Torchlight like the enchanter to try and buff up your gear too if luck isn’t on your side or you want to keep something that’s nearly good enough around longer, although these can be money sinks and the enchanter in particularly sometimes makes mistakes like removing all enchantments that can really sting. At the same time, the thrill in finding a perfect new weapon or something with a particularly strong effect comes from the randomness and risks, and as you progress the game at least makes sure you won’t be underequipped by making even the worst gear you find stronger than stuff from higher floors.

 

However, if you do pick up items often, you’ll find your inventory cluttered quickly, especially since your top row of your pack will likely be filled with evergreen useful items like potions or the scrolls used to identify mysterious loot. Luckily, you’re not adventuring alone beneath the mining town of Torchlight, the player able to bring a dog or cat along as a battle pet. The pet has its own inventory of the same size and can be sent back to town quickly to sell whatever you put in that inventory, and while it will join you in battle automatically, you can also give it some spells so it can play a bit of support as well. The pet’s relationship to the loot system is very appreciated since it means you have to pop back to town less, although already there’s basically no penalty for doing so and you can take a portal back into the dungeon right where you left off. It does keep the delves from having to start and stop too often though, although if you want to do side quests you must visit Torchlight often to pick them up. Side quests are, sadly, rather plain for the most part. The Ember scholar Vasman always asks you to find a specific Ember laying somewhere in the dungeon, and on nearly every floor, the robotic bard Trill-Bot 4000 will ask you to defeat a “champion” enemy which is basically a much stronger variant than what you’ll normally find there. There’s almost no story to such quests, although a man in town called Hatch gives the more interesting set of activities involving popping into a portal that serves as a preview of an upcoming area, the player facing stronger and unfamiliar foes before encountering them below Torchlight naturally.

However, Hatch and the pet are both part of a little issue with Torchlight’s difficulty. With your pet eagerly running into battle to fight for you, they often distract enemies well enough that you won’t be in too much peril early on. Similarly, Hatch’s portal quests will allow you to find loot and gain levels earlier than you’re meant to, meaning early floors of the subterranean dungeon end up being a bit too easy. If you take every opportunity afforded to you, Torchlight will take a while to become challenging, but at the same time, Hatch’s portals will offer you pockets of difficulty despite essentially making the dungeon you’re meant to be in easier for a while as a result. This won’t remain the case for the entire adventure, and as you leave the early mines and start reaching areas like the sunken ruins or Molten Prison, there are enemies with more of an edge than what you face early on. The Champions tend to be flashpoints, able to take a hit and sometimes give pesky boosts to a swarm of nearby enemies, and when a foe can do something like slow your attacks, they can help tip the scales towards their side for a bit. A lot of fighting in Torchlight is quick enough when it’s easy that it won’t slow things down at least, and while there are higher difficulties to select from if you want to make even the plainer foes harder to kill, Torchlight does make sure its final areas at least put up a fight even if you’ve used Hatch’s portals and your pet to your frequent advantage.

 

The pressure of the lategame’s more dire situations does add some zest back to Torchlight’s action, and while the main adventure might only take around 10 hours if you do make the time for the simple side quests, there are also ways to extend your playtime afterwards. The post-game dungeon known as the Shadow Vault is a never-ending dungeon that gets tougher and tougher while giving you better and better rewards, and if you do want to play through the game as the other classes, you can even retire your previous hero and have them pass on some power to the one that follows. There are other small touches like being able to catch fish that will briefly turn your pet into a monster if you feed it to them, but a lot of the game’s attention will always be focused on the standard action. You click on foes to target them with regular attacks, use a set of skills or spells you’ve set to keyboard shortcuts to unleash extra attacks, and if the foe happens to gain an edge, you start moving around and try to be a bit more clever, although a death even comes with a few options on how you want to revive. Reviving right where you die comes with a penalty to gold and experience, starting at the floor entrance won’t reset anything but does cost gold, or you can always return to town for free. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it might be a while before you die unless you are a new player getting to grips with things, but while Torchlight will ease in those types of players with some of its early low difficulty encounters with slimes and goblins, when you start facing dragon men and demonesses, death won’t feel like a far away threat any longer.

THE VERDICT: Torchlight taps into the satisfaction of gradually honing yourself into a better fighter through random finds and deliberate choices. Your skill tree growth and spell selection put important and helpful tools in your hands for customizing your hero while the lucky loot drops give an exciting shake-up that incentivizes you to scour every inch of the dungeons you explore. Your pet, while a helpful companion, can help tip things in your favor early on alongside the benefits of doing the game’s simple side quests, but there are challenges to be found that will test not just how strong your gear is, but how you’ve managed to mold your character into your own preferred warrior.

 

And so, I give Torchlight for PC…

A GOOD rating. While the opening being made a bit easy was likely why I put down Torchlight before it could hook me, going back now to see it through shows the game does have a good mix of moments that ask more of the player and moments that let them zone out and easily wipe out enemies in search of new goodies. Being about a ten hour adventure even if you are trying to do everything along the main story does keep certain elements of its design in check, the skill trees not overly robust or complicated but still able to let you shake up your play style or acquire new powers that shift how you approach combat. The story staying out of the way means most of your time spent with Torchlight will be either pushing forward in the dungeon or taking requisite trips to town that hardly last a few minutes even at their busiest, the game paring away much of the fluff that could have pulled attention away from the hack and slash dungeon delving. At the same time, it means there isn’t too much character to the world, new regions of the underground dungeon just feeling like they exist for a change of visuals and enemy types rather than creating a compelling setting. Fans of Diablo who drop in just for a snack of an action RPG will likely appreciate its mostly no-nonsense approach to providing basic quests and not having many scenes to distract from the gameplay loop and newbies won’t end up distracted from coming to grips with the mouse and keyboard combat, but while Torchlight’s design choices are effective, you won’t be thinking much about Ember or Alric after. At the same time, that’s why something like the Shadow Vault exists, an endless dungeon to tackle without much thought if you just want to connect back to the same entertaining loop of facing foes, grabbing loot, and growing stronger with there being even less in your way to finding the dungeon crawling zen state.

 

Torchlight was, amusingly, meant to be a way to give people a taste of the Torchlight setting before an MMO was made, but the massively-multiplayer online RPG never materialized. Torchlight’s setting is at best providing a colorful magic-fueled fantasy world, but it truly feels like it is mostly not trying to do much story-telling nor is it establishing much of a setting. There are glimmers of lore behind some elements, but they’ll be hard to see behind all of the shimmering loot that feels like Torchlight’s true focus. There isn’t anything wrong with trying to focus on the action most of all here though, Torchlight providing an entertaining RPG loop to get lost in for a while but giving you an early enough end to the adventure if you aren’t the kind to delve into the same dungeons again and again for incremental increases.