Vital Stats

Genre: Action RPG
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Runic Games
Publisher: Perfect World Entertainment
ESRB Rating: Unrated
Release Date: 10/27/09

Platforms

• PC

Torchlight looks so much like Diablo II that you might worry it will feel derivative, but only if you have no idea who designed it. Developer Runic Games is populated by veterans of the Diablo series, Fate, and the nearly released Mythos. So instead of a knockoff, Torchlight turns out to be more of a successor. It’s a refined example of the Roguelike action RPG.

Good Things Come In Subtle Packages
Comparisons between Torchlight and the Diablo series are inevitable, but boring. Both are class-based action RPGs that use character development to accent hack and slash gameplay. Both use procedural level design to flesh out a smattering of handcrafted gameplay spaces. Both feature an ancient evil buried miles beneath a town. Torchlight even employs random equipment generation that follows the [adjective] [compound noun] of the [animal name] template, so sometimes your character ends up gripping an Epic Smoldering Rod of the Monkey.

Thank god you’re here, there’s an evil MacGuffin under our
city! Could you maybe stab it before it eats the world?

Hot monkey rod notwithstanding, Torchlight is less interesting for the places it retreads old territory than for the skill with which it does so. The improvements are largely subtle and systemic, but make for a more compelling experience than you’d expect from a workaday roguelike.

Perhaps the biggest improvement that you’ll never notice is Torchlight‘s sense of place. The procedural generation that defines a roguelike usually offers an unlimited supply of novel levels, but something about the underlying randomization makes them feel homogenous. Torchlight mitigates this problem by frequently changing tilesets, using depth to create multi-layered levels, and making effective use of secret rooms. It’s not so complex and diverse that you’ll never recognize recurring level elements, but playing Torchlight feels more like genuine exploration than you might expect.

Another subtle but pervasive improvement is the streamlined character development system. Advancement comes in levels, with the interesting character building quantified in skill points. Each of the three classes has about fifteen unique skills that define your character’s agency in the game world, but all three classes share the same passive skills. So although one class might summon minions where another might fire explosive projectiles, both can spend points to boost the experience gain when a monster dies. It’s a design choice that makes all three classes a bit more homogenous, but makes character growth noticeably less kludgey.

Not everything about Torchlight is subtle, and class skills and equippable spells foster remarkably tactical gameplay. Spellcasting and special abilities in this sort of game rarely amount to more than light bloom and bonus damage, but the action in Torchlight is all about crowd control. Most damaging abilities produce knockback and slowing effects that you can use to push and herd enemy groups. Whether you’re hamstringing pigmy blowgunners in a running firefight, or marching your minion army into a crowd of hostiles and then teleporting away to laugh about the bloodbath, Torchlight packs remarkably diverse action into a relatively small array of skills.

~You got the thing!~
Wait, wrong game.

A final notable gameplay feature is that your hero comes with a selectable pet dog or cat. Your pet is a lite version of your character. It gains experience but no skills. It can equip gear, but less than you can. It can fight, but it isn’t terribly smart. Critically, it has an inventory, and you can send it to town to sell useless gear with a button press. By saving you the interruption of haggling, your pet smooths the gameplay flow and prevents bookkeeping from interfering with Torchlight‘s pacing.

Undermining
Considering the procedurally generated levels, randomized equipment, and streamlined character development, Torchlight makes a lot of game out of comparitively few assets. Even the game’s development time was brief at about one year, and the roughly twenty-five developers constitute a small team by industry standards. Impressive as these development stats are, they may have also contributed to some usability issues.

In what can only be a play for the irony angle, Torchlight has revived the load times of yesteryear’s gaming along with its keen mechanics. Startup times for the game can range as high as a minute, and load times between levels are noticeable, but never quite long enough for a sandwich. The load times do a lot to compromise the immersion and flow that your economically savvy pet facilitates, so the final experience ends up being a wash. There has been an update in the two weeks since Torchlight‘s debut to address the load times, and that reflects well on the team’s resolve to eliminate this and a handful of minor gameplay glitches. However it’s surprising that the game went to market before the obvious bugs were resolved.

Torchlight also runs into some trouble with its user interface. Despite its whimsical and cartoony art style, the game’s interactive elements aren’t as clearly highlighted as you might expect. The game’s cursor, for example, is relatively small and colored a matte gray, so it tends to blend into subterranean backdrops. This relatively trivial issue blooms into a gameplay problem because the same mouse button designates travel destinations and combat targets. This makes it entirely too easy to accidentally run a ranged hero into a roiling mass of enemies, where the outcome is unpleasantly quick and decisive.

These issues are hardly dealbreakers for Torchlight, but they do represent odd omissions of polish that mar the game’s excellent design. They’re likely just symptomatic of the game’s short development cycle, and hopefully they’ll be resolved before Runic revisits Torchlight as a MMORPG.

The Dig
Torchlight unearths venerable gameplay concepts from the Diablo dynasty and sockets in features that give it a +2 to modern design sensibilities. It is a narrowly focused game, so fans of roguelikes and action RPGs will find a lot to love, but everyone else will just wonder why they never see their gamer friends any more. The hardcore should appreciate the long-term playability afforded by procedural generation and a tactical twist on classic gamplay concepts. Casual gamers already comfortable with World of Warcraft will find that this game offers more action without additional barriers to entry.

What It Costs: $20

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $30 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $40 (buy)
•To The Casual: $10 (demo)