Review: Torchlight

I'm late for work, and you might be too. If that's the case, I'll make this quick. Buy Torchlight. It's cheap and fun. It's a fantastic time-sink, and I say that in the most complimentary way I can.



Now, if you've got a little more time to spare…

Torchlight comes to us from Runic Games, which includes some of Diablo's and Diablo II's designers. That's fairly evident from the get-go. At its core, Torchlight is a cartoonish Diablo II clone, although that risks glossing over some of Torchlight's more entertaining and well-crafted aspects.

Like Diablo and its ilk, Torchlight can be summed up thusly: the player creates a character from one of three classes (magic, ranged, melee) and proceeds to click their way through randomized dungeons, gaining experience and randomly generated loot, until they reach the end of the plot. All you do as the player is pick which talents to put points in as you level, choose or sell gear, and click on monsters until they die.

It's surprisingly addictive.

While Torchlight only gives you three classes, each class has three talent trees (to borrow a phrase from another time-sink…) which offer a decent range of variety. You can make a sword-and-board paladin, if that's what blows your skirts up, he'll just be called a Destroyer—the game's name for the fighter character.

There's a plot, but let's be honest; the game is about clicking on monsters and picking things up until you've got the best, coolest-looking gear you possibly can. If that gets old, you can always do the fishing minigame at any of the fishing holes in town or in the various dungeons. There are rare catches, such as items, but the main purpose of fishing is catching food for your pet.

The pet mechanic is easily the coolest thing about this game. Keeping the goal of stomping monsters in the fore, the pet acts as tank, DPS, and/or caster (yes, you can teach your cat to summon zombies), holds excess inventory, and—get ready—can be sent back to town to automatically sell off the gear from wherever you are and return with the money. That's right, no more trudging back in the middle of a dungeon crawl to sell fourteen pairs of old shoes, no choosing between items because you can't carry that stack of healing potions AND the Axe of Ultimate Destruction!

That's just one indication of the focus in this game. Clearly, Runic intended this to be a simple, fun, addictive dungeon-crawler, and they've succeeded admirably.

Buy or Don't Buy: Buy, easily. It's about $20, and makes up for a lack of multiplayer with a robust modding community and literally endless random dungeons. It's not a life-changing epic, but it is the kind of fun you can have in five minutes or two hours without sacrificing attention, brain power, or personal relationships. Runic also plans an MMO based on the game, which may or may not incorporate the single-player version.