Gaming Weekly w47: Torchlight
Monday, November 16, 2009Many gamedevelopers have tried to imitate the typical role-playing elements of the Diablo-series and only a few actually succeed. Torchlight is one of them and together with it’s quirky handdrawn art-direction it seems to be a pretty good game. Torchlight was developed by Runic Games, a computer game company from the co-founders of Blizzard North.
The World of Torchlight
Torchlight is an action role-playing game hack’n slash. It’s fantasy-themed with expansive dungeons and caverns. The player get to control one hero of the players chosen class to explore a series of randomized dungoens, where he/she get to fight a large numbers of enemies, collect equipment and gold. The game also have a single town which acts as a hub to the other parts of the world. The game is presented with an overhead perspective like the isometric perspective used in the original Diablo, and the game is navigated using a mouse and a keyboard.
Dungeoneering
If you guys have played the Diablo-series before you know what this is, Torchlight generates each dungeon by assembling parts of a certain game-environment to create whole dungeons for the player to traverse. They also contain scripted interactive objects as well as random loot. The player also have a permanent pet which can fight along side you and has the sweet ability to carry and to sell loot for you so that you don’t have to make that trip back to town, now we don’t actually have to carry around all those town-portal scrolls like we did in the Diablo-series. The game also has a retirement system, in which the player can pass on an heirloom item from an old character to a newly-created one, can be compared to a New Game+ Mode, though only one item is allowed.
The character can choose from three different classes:
- “The Destroyer” which is a character proficient in melee combat and with the ability to call forth spirits to produce magical effects.
- “The Alchemist” a spellcaster with the magical power of Ember. He can fire blasts of magic and electricity from his focus glove, and summon imps and steampunk-styled robots.
- “The Vanquisher” is an elite city guard, sent undercover to investigate the town of Torchlight, specializes in ranged weaponry and traps.
The player can then choose to specialize these classes into class-specific skill trees, furthermore there is a seperate class of spells that any character can learn from scrolls regardless of class.
Future Games and Modding
Runic also plans to release a MMORPG set int he Torchlight game world, where the developers said that the singleplayer game is to introduce the game-world to the players. Hopefully we get to see this awesome release on the XBLA as well. The singleplayer game Torchlight is also designed to allow extensive modding by players, Runic has released editing tools which allow players to mod the game. The editor is known as TorchED where modders can create their own content.
The game has recieved many positive reviews and it’s pretty cheap. You can get it from steam for 15,99€ (162 SEK, 24 USD) So go get it if you like these types of games.
