Torchlight: Click Click Click

Sick days are great for finishing up posts.


STORY 2/5
There was a story? Oh, yeah I guess there was.

You arrive in a town called Torchlight and was asked to help find her mentor who seems to have gone mad and disappeared. You were told he's in the mines so off you go. You, of course, do eventually find him after traversing 30 some-odd levels of this "mine". The lady who recruits you does not help you at all, although you don't need help anyway.

CHARACTERS 2/5
I have no background story so the character class really only determines your play style. The only person with some sort of background is the mentor, Master Alric who's, well, crazy I suppose. What drove him to his obsession with Ember, the main cause of all of this town's chaos, is played out through transcripts of his findings/thoughts when you descend the main story dungeon.

SOUND 3.5/5
The music and sounds in this game bleeds Diablo. I swear the original composer of the Diablo series who joined the team purposely made it Diablo-like. The town theme, especially, sounds just like Diablo's town theme. The sound effects are practically identical (e.g. the scrolls and gold sfx). I don't know if that's a bad thing but it definitely makes the game want you to feel right at home. Diablo's home sweet home feel.

Where's my Diablo... :(

GRAPHICS 3/5
Nothing impressive. If anything, it's outdated and cartoony but I've seen community mods available to possibly remedy this or at least update it a bit if you wished to do so. The simplicity of its visuals reflects the rest of the game quite well though.

GAMEPLAY 3/5
The deliciously simplified version of Diablo, keeping the formula that made Diablo so addictive. Unique to the game is a pet animal that's another additional inventory pack and can sell stuff for you while you're still dungeon crawling. You can also feed it different types of fish for it to transform into other monsters with different attacks and resistances. It's not particularly useful since it likes to die a lot. Speaking of fish you can fish at fishing spots scattered across the dungeon.

OVERALL 3/5
A great game reminiscent to Diablo in almost every way, which doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing but it definitely does make you yearn for more out of the game. Torchlight doesn't feel particularly polished nor incomplete, although its simplicity does do the job for what it is. The devs did mention that they had more plans for the game but due to time constraints, they had to take it out (e.g. multiplayer) which is where Torchlight 2 comes in to fill in the gaps.

The game was fun and plenty addictive but as a whole there was a lot of missing potential. We'll just have to see how Torchlight 2 does to make up for the first.