Just when I was losing total faith in the gaming industry, a dark horse has come from the night mist and reassured me that all is well thanks to Runic Games’ new game Torchlight.
There are a lot of people comparing Torchlight to Diablo, and probably for good reason since some of the developers came from Blizzard, and the composer worked on both Diablo 1 and 2. Personally, I was never much of a Diablo fan. I couldn’t get into the games that much, played for a bit, but gave up. But this game actually takes me back to the fun I used to have in college playing Nethack and Angband. This game is to those what I had hoped Diablo would have been.
The basic premise of the game is a rudimentary dungeon crawler. Choose your class (melee, caster, or ranged… called Destroyer, Alchemist, and Vanquisher, respectively), then head into the mine to kill some baddies and take some loot. But they’ve pretty well nailed the execution, as it’s easy to pick up and an absolute blast to play. The visuals are nice, too… almost cartoony in style instead of the typical “dark & gloomy” graphics that would be associated with a game involving delving into dungeons to kill hordes of the undead, goblins, the random troll or two, and various other cavedwellers who have a curious supply of gold on them. There are no ridiculously high polygon models or GPU destroying shader effects, but the game still looks brilliant. It manages to runs on my nvidia GeForce 8600 in full detail at 1680×1050 without so much as a hiccup, and includes a button for “netbook mode” for hacking baddies on your ultraportable.
So for now, I’m only 2-3 hours into Torchlight, but I would like to thank the guys at Runic for assuring me that there ARE developers out there who know their roots, are still gamers at heart, and aren’t run simply by businessmen looking for bucks. I look forward to many more hours of delving into the mine, shooting trolls and skeletons in the face, and occasionally sending my trusty pet back to the surface to bring back some gold for me. Now if only there were a way to make him bring me back a few more Identify Scrolls… maybe it’s time to start modding or hope for that in the MMO version that’s coming soon.
Thanks again Runic, and for anyone that doesn’t yet have Torchlight, it’s available on their site or on Steam.
