Torchlight was designed and developed partly by the team who brought us the original Diablo and Fate games—and that heritage is strong and easily found within the experience. Just as in Diablo, players choose from three base characters who each have their own skill tree, and proceed through a series of increasingly more difficult random environments. However, not all of the game’s similarities with its ancestry are due to the development team. Many of these features are now standard in the genre, which was defined by Diablo. These aspects would need to be present in any dungeon crawl, no matter who made it. Breaking the mold that these very folks made nearly 15 years ago would be almost unthinkable.

That’s not a critique of the game. I—and many like me—have been waiting for a new Diablo game for many years, playing Diablo II over and over again. It’s a good thing for us that it’s one of the most replayable video games ever made. Diablo III not only appears to still be very far away, but seems less and less like the Diablo I’ve loved each time I read something new about it.

The title screen

Pursuit

The plot is, of course, the area where this game diverges most from its heritage. In the small mining town of Torchlight, something evil has taken residence beneath the surface. Deep under the mines, something is causing the Ember (a precious stone) to have an evil influence over the native creatures. The player’s character is sent to investigate, and after starting to become infected herself, must see the investigation through or suffer the evil influence of the mines.

The town of Torchlight

This investigation includes descending floor by floor beneath the mountain, through ancient caves, haunted graveyards, infested and ruinous garden cities, magic-filled libraries, Dwarven fortresses, and so on. Each area has its own enemy sub-types and beautiful graphics sets, and of course, every level is randomly assembled. It’s even difficult to see right away what pieces the levels are constructed from, something which is usually pretty obvious in any game with random levels.

In addition to the main plot line, there are several sub-plots which require the player to complete basic objectives for the other characters in the small town. These take the form of repeatable tasks which become more difficult as the game progresses. In this way, there are a lot of quests to be done, but none of the side quests really get in the way of the main quest, and few of them even pull the player away from the main storyline for more than a few seconds if done in the right order. This simplification of the questing model might make the plot seem less rich than other games, but it may add something to the replayability of the game, since many players stop caring about the plot after the first play through a dungeon crawl anyway.

Most quests are fairly basic

The three characters are the standard Fighter, Mage, and Ranger choices that one would expect, each with three areas of expertise that one can choose their skills from, becoming as specialized or as broadly focused as one wishes within the class. For example, the ranger—my favorite class—can specialize as a distance fighter, a small weapons dervish type, a trap-setter, or she can take a few skills here and there from each specialization.

The character creation screen

Each character gets to choose between a dog or a cat for a pet. As far as I can tell, there is no difference between the two, other than visual preference. There are, however, lots of fish in the game. Your character earns fish by completing a simple fishing mini-game at various points in the dungeon, each of which gives the pet a different bonus or transformation which can last from 6 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the catch. The pet can also be equipped with two rings, two spell scrolls and an amulet, and in this way one can customize the animal to fill whatever role the player needs.

This pet has been transformed with an electric eel

Panorama

The fun art style can be best described as “bright crystal steampunk”. Lots of gears and brass make the whole thing look very Victorian/robotic, but at the same time there is not the absence of other colors that usually characterizes that style. The colors are crisp and not too vibrant.The engine itself has greatly scalable graphics. It even has a specific “Netbook Mode” designed to be optimized for computers with low GPU power and smaller screens, a feature that we might begin to see more of as netbooks become more and more popular. However, the engine might not be as optimized as it could be at the other end of the scaling spectrum. It doesn’t play well at all for me on its highest setting, and I have a GeForce 9600 GT. While not top of the line anymore, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Of course, everyone’s experience will be different in this regard.

There are many different types of environments to adventure through

As one would perhaps expect, the camera is overhead isometric, and has some zoom controls, but no rotation. To get a better look at the graphics style, check out the exploration video:

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