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Diablo kicked off the dungeon crawling action RPG as we know it today. Create a character, slay monsters for experience and loot, level up and become more powerful. Diablo III is the game that really got me into the genre, after the Loot 2.0 update that is, and ever since, I’ve kept an eye out for others. Several popular action RPGs have released over the years, each with a different taste and alterations to the formula that Diablo helped establish. Among them is Torchlight and its development was led by the same guy who brought us FATE. Developed by Runic Games and published by Perfect World Entertainment, Torchlight was released for PC in 2009 and a port for Xbox 360 was released in 2011. For this review, I played the PC version. I have played through this game before, multiple times in fact, but it’s been a while since my last playthrough and I wanted to jump back in and see how it holds up.
I’m going to say right off the bat that I love the world and art style of Torchlight but the story is pretty forgettable. Luckily, you don’t really need to know what’s going on in the story to enjoy the gameplay. The protagonist, your character, arrives in the town of Torchlight and is recruited by a sage to help find her mentor who has disappeared in a nearby mine which serves as the entrance to the many floors you’ll traverse throughout the main quest. I’ll refer to it as the “dungeon” going forward. After locating the mentor, it’s revealed he has been corrupted by Ember, a mysterious ore, and the protagonist is tasked with seeking out not only the mentor but also the source of the Ember’s corruption and destroying it.
Torchlight is game that doesn’t really do anything we haven’t seen before in other games in the genre. But it is fun and easy to jump into. There are three character classes to choose from and just like in FATE, you will be accompanied by a pet. You can equip your pet with certain gear and spells and it has its own inventory slots. You can give your pet any items you don’t want to carry yourself and send it back to town to sell them which is very convenient. It means you can keep progressing through the dungeon rather than stopping to go back to town to clear out your inventory. Also borrowed from FATE is fish. You can fish at fishing holes and the fish can be fed to your pet to transform it into different creatures. Torchlight is the town and this is where you can interact with NPCs and merchants, accept quests, and access your stashes including a shared stash for multiple characters.
The gameplay is your standard action RPG fare. Kill monsters and complete quests for experience and loot, level up, and distribute points to your character’s attributes and skills. Completing quests and slaying certain monsters also grants you fame and after earning enough fame, you’re awarded a skill point. Spells are also a thing but are not exclusive to certain character classes. Any character can learn spells from scrolls and unlearn them at any time. Loot is basically all the items in the game including gear and weapons that your character can equip. Gear and weapons can come in different rarities and will have magical properties, or in other words, grant bonuses of some kind. Even set items are present here. Furthermore, items can have sockets for gems to be inserted into granting the items additional bonus properties. Items can be bought and sold at merchants and the merchants here are pretty standard. Besides those that buy and sell stuff, there’s a merchant that lets you transmute items and another that lets you enchant items. You can also destroy items to recover the gems inside or destroy the gems inside items to free the sockets.
I guess the real question is, if Torchlight isn’t all that different from others of its kind, why play it over the others? Well everything it does, it does well and it’s just simply fun to play. The bestiary is diverse and the actual combat feels pretty good. Enemies can explode into a bloody mess which never gets old. The game feels structured similarly to the first Diablo. You got your town and the dungeon underneath. You go from floor to floor slaying monsters. Every several floors the scenery changes and you will come across waypoint portals back to town. These are basically shortcuts to each area of the dungeon. Torchlight also borrows some elements from Diablo II like skills, sockets and gems among some other things. I don’t think the character building here is quite as deep but it is easy to understand and feels more forgiving in my opinion. Pumping points into the right attributes and skills and equipping the right gear is important but you also have room to experiment and try different things. But, unfortunately, there is no way to respec skills without a mod. Although, I can’t say I ever hit a wall because of my character build in any of my playthroughs.
I think what makes action RPG’s like this fun is primarily the loot. You click around the screen doing the same things over and over again and it’s mainly for loot, shiny new toys to play with that make you more powerful. Improving your character by leveling up is only part of what makes these types of games rewarding. Finding the cool gear is the other part. That cool weapon or armor a monster dropped that makes a noticeable difference. But for the system to work, to get the player hooked, I feel good loot needs to drop frequently enough to keep you going. If monsters are always dropping junk, things can get boring.
So the question is, are the loot drops in Torchlight good? They’re okay. Typically better than quest rewards, that’s for sure. But the quests are worth completing for the experience and fame. In all honesty, it was pretty rare that something super amazing dropped but I feel enchanting does make up for this. Whenever I was ready for a change and nothing great was dropping, I would simply keep any decent item of any rarity I found in the dungeon or buy one from a merchant and take it to the enchanter. Enchanting items will grant them bonus properties and create sockets. You can turn even common items into powerful items this way. But enchanting does come with the risk of disenchantment, meaning there’s a chance you can lose all the bonuses.
One reason I really this genre is because of the replay value. Just like others of it’s kind, many of the floors or levels in Torchlight are procedurally generated so no two playthroughs will ever be exactly the same. Furthermore, characters can be built in different ways and the loot drops are random. Plus, there are scrolls you can acquire that open portals to various dungeons. Torchlight doesn’t feature seasons with unique rewards or anything like that but after beating the main quest, you’ll be granted access to the Shadow Vault which is basically a dungeon that never ends so you can just keep playing and the quality of the loot drops is increased. It may not be as in depth as the end game stuff in some other games of its kind but if you like the gameplay and loop here, the fun doesn’t necessarily have to end just because you finished the story. I think one of Torchlight’s bigger draws is mods. As far as I know, there’s a solid community surrounding Torchlight and its sequel and there’s a good amount of mods to mix things up.
I really like Torchlight’s presentation. It’s colorful and cartoony, each area of the dungeon looks and feels distinct, and the animations and visual and gore effects are pretty good. I find it to be a pleasing game on the eyes and the presentation compliments the fantasy elements nicely. As for the music, Matt Uelman composed the soundtrack and this is the same guy who did the music for Diablo among other games. I immediately noticed that the town theme has elements reminiscent of Tristram’s theme. Overall, the music is good and compliments the theme and gameplay nicely with a nice mix of ambient and more dramatic sounding stuff. On the technical side, I’m happy to say I encountered no major issues.
I love Torchlight and it was fun to revisit. I do think the sequel is better but this is still enjoyable even after all these years. It may not be the deepest action RPG available, even for its time, but that’s okay. The game doesn’t overwhelm you with systems or mechanics. It’s very accessible. In fact, I think it makes a great gateway to the genre because of how easy it is to pick up and play and understand. There are multiple difficulty levels and on Normal, it’s not all that hard to get through the game. Character building is fun and allows for experimentation and progression feels rewarding. Sure, there are things that could be better or improved and, luckily, Torchlight was designed with modding in mind and there are plenty of mods out there and some may remedy any issues you have. There are mods that change and rebalance things and others that add things like respec and new pets for example. Torchlight may not have an abundance of progression systems or extensive end-game content but it still has great replay value and the modding community should be able to keep it alive for years to come.
I absolutely recommend Torchlight. It’s a wonderful entry in the genre that still holds up really well today. It’s accessible, rewarding, pleasing on the eyes, and most importantly, fun. It is a little disappointing that it doesn’t support multiplayer of any kind but there is plenty here to keep you coming back and it does support mods. Definitely check it out.