Besides, the console port of “Torchlight” is very well done. The controls are simple and direct, with mapable buttons and triggers for spells. I wouldn’t call the game simple, but it’s a perfect fit for light arcade gaming.
Gameplay
With four classes of characters and more weapons and gear than you can shake a magic staff at, “Torchlight” has plenty of variety. While the dungeons are touted as “randomized,” you’ll quickly start to recognize familiar layouts and enemy groups. It doesn’t really detract from the experience, though. The levels are easily traversed and beautifully designed. The camera perspective can be a pain in close quarters (small rooms and hallways), but works perfectly well in large caves.
As I said earlier, controlling your character is pretty simple. Using your character well is a challenge though, given the variety of spells and weapons. You could just use your handheld weapon exclusively, but without some form of offensive or defensive spell casting, you’ll quickly become overrun by hordes of enemies. Personally, I prefer to keep a spell that knocks back enemies tied to a hot key at all times.
The inventory system isn’t too bad, though I have a hard time utilizing the triggers and bumpers to navigate through the panels. When you’re transferring items between yourself, your pet, and a merchant, it’s really easy to keep scrolling to the wrong tab. You definitely don’t want to think as hard about inventory management as you do battle strategy. Hopefully the sequel will be a little more fluid in this regard. It can be annoying, but it’s minor in the scheme of things.
At least selling your loot is easy enough; just use a spell scroll to open a portal to town, or load up your pet and send him into town to do the selling for you. Once you learn to recognize what items are worth picking up, you’ll really only end up selling old items that you’ve outgrown. Really, the expectation of finding a better weapon or piece of armor right around the corner drives the whole game anyway.
Speaking of driving the game, don’t go looking for multiplayer loot fests. “Torchlight” is strictly single player, although a lot of gamers (including myself) expected some form of co-op playability to be added. Few Arcade titles these days don’t have multiplayer, unless they’re artistic and story driven. “Torchlight” is perfectly fine as a single-player title, though. Maybe the rumored sequel will throw us a bone.
Graphics
“Torchlight” holds up well graphically compared to other XBLA games, which can be tough competition. The art style (“World of Warcraft”-ish) is well-realized and a nice change of pace from the standard Unreal Engine fare clogging the market these days.
As solid as the gameplay is, graphics are where “Torchlight”’s major flaws are. The load times can be a good 10 seconds, but considering that you can explore an entire level of a dungeon without seeing additional load screens negates that a little bit. But if start casting a bunch of spells against hordes of spell casting enemies, the frame rate drops considerably. In fact, the game will freeze for about two seconds when things get really bad. So far, I haven’t had any crashes or system freezes, so that’s something, I guess. But I figured a two-year-old PC game that can run on netbooks wouldn’t be so rough on the Xbox 360.
Difficulty
“Torchlight” comes with the standard easy/normal/hard difficulties. Playing through on normal, I’ve only died once. I’ve since learned to keep a finger on my healing spell or health potion; spell casting enemies and hordes of little ones can quickly mess you up. The only indicator of your health is a meter in the upper left corner of the screen, which can be easy to overlook when you’re busy fighting. I guess my big complaint about the difficulty is that there are no gameplay cues for low health or mana (your character will say something when you run out of mana, but that’s like saying “We need gas” on an empty tank).
Conclusion
So other than not being optimized for the 360’s hardware and annoying inventory management, “Torchlight” really shines as one of the better Arcade titles available today. It’s a rare thing for a game demo to convince me to buy a game at full retail, especially now that Microsoft has been offering discounts on games and DLC pretty regularly lately. If you’re not completely into “Torchlight” after playing the demo, you should consider picking it up if/when it goes on sale in a few months.
If a co-op mode had been included (two-player seems the most plausible; I can’t picture four-player working that well), I’d elevate “Torchlight” from “Worth It” to “Must Buy”. If online play on the Xbox 360 is more your style, I’d recommend picking “Torchlight” up on PC and giving it a try. It’s not something you want to drop $15 unless you’ll really enjoy it. But I did, and I’m pretty picky. That’s probably the most praise I can give a game these days.
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