Overview

Torchlight is a new game with many fascinating features to it. You have journeyed to this far away land known as torchlight in search of Ember a rare and powerful ore that runs through the planet. When you arrive you encounter two heroes, Brink and Syl, who are trying to fight off a monster invasion in the towns mine. Syl becomes injured, and Brink charges in to get his revenge. Your job is to chase in after him for support. In the great battle fought Brink is turned into a great beast by Syl’s former mentor Master Alric. You are forced to slay him but are yourself infected by the ore that transformed the hero. Your only hope now is to venture into the deepest bowls of the mine in search of a cure. The deeper you search the more you discover this situation goes far beyond your curse but, instead the fate of the world now lies in your hands. You find that Master Alric first tried to resist the infectious call of the Ember but, the call was to great for him to resist. As you go deeper you find something else is behind this evil call of power. Will you be the one to discover who or what it is? Will you be the one to defeat it? Will you succumb to the call and join the evil path of power? Only time will tell.

Characters

You have three classes to play as the archer, warrior, and mage. Each one has a 3 branch talent tree. The branches for each tree can be mixed and match allowing limitless talent trees. You have a choice of a pet, dog or cat, to accompany you on your journey. Your pets fight for you they can eat fish which transform them into different beast with strengths and weaknesses. They can also learn magic spells such as heal all and summon zombie. I have to say though the greatest thing these for legged companions do is go back to town to sell your merchandise. One thing I always hate in games is when your inventory is full and you either have to drop items, or quit what you are doing and find a merchant to sell items to. Now you simply fill your four legged friend’s inventory with unwanted items and send them off to the merchant to sell the items and return with your gold. While you do lose the pet for a while is relatively short and you are able to continue questing while you wait.

World

You spend most of the game in the Ember mine going deeper and deeper one level at a time. So it is in essence a tower game with level, after level, after level. Normally, I would say this is a bad thing that becomes very repetitive but the creators did a remarkable job at making every level having its own unique character. The world’s artwork really adds to this effect. They made sure that different levels were almost like new worlds. Whether it was a actual mine, a jungle ruin, a lava prison, a dwarven city, a black abyss and the list goes on. The artwork is done very well all and all.

Gameplay

The basic fighting style is a button mashing fighter at its most basic core component. However with higher difficulty settings that becomes almost impossible. This is a good thing as much as we all love good old button mashers they never stay entertaining very long. With the built in talent trees and the search for better gear well thought out strategy is required to press forward. The movement system works well but, is not my favorite the only way to move is point and click with your mouse. At times this is nice but, it is always better to have a choice. We all love our WASD controls and prefer those for most forms of movement keeping our right hand free for more advanced features than point and click. You have 1-0 hotkeys that you can assign spells items and potions to for more convenient use. Your right mouse button can have two abilities assigned to it that you switch between using your tab key. At any point and time your can exit your game and it will auto save for you there is no search for a save point which is a plus.

Replay Value

Overall I would say the replay value is moderate. While you can modify your character many different ways to change game play. The overall story and areas to be traveled do not change overall. So I have to say except for trying the new character class you won’t find much more desire to play it over and over again.

Gamelength

All and all the game is not all that long I played through easy for the test and it took right at 15 hours and I was exploring a good bit. (I like 100% map completion :P). Anyways there are 3 more difficulties beyond easy to make a great challenge I am sure will extended game play time a great length. I always love having difficultly options, because I love to go thru quick first to get the whole story. Then I like to go back thru the game a second time to really challenge myself and sink my teeth into the battle system.

Sound

The sound was done well over all. As for the voice actors they did fit their parts quite nicely. The voice acting was a bit over the top and cheesy however but, sometimes that can be more entertaining. Some of the character responses got repetitive. Including every time you set off a trap your character bluntly states what you did. Once you have set off a few hundred traps this is rather obnoxious. Overall the sound quality was good.

Overall Value

I do recommend this game to those that simply love the traditional role-playing story. I also suggest it as a good starter game for those who have just been introduced to the genre and aren’t quite ready for the over elaborate UI systems that most RPGs tend to have.