Diablo Clone: Though many would consider this to be the mark of inferiority–showing that a game couldn’t establish itself enough to warrant its own description–others see this as a badge of honor. And who else would be more fitting to carry the Diablo torch than former members of Blizzard’s own development team, on that very title? Formed from the remains of the imploded Flagship Studios, which was primarily made up of Blizzard malcontents to begin with, Runic Games was looking to reignite a fire under fans who had been calling for a Diablo sequel for nearly a decade. Torchlight was released in October of 2009 to widespread critical acclaim. Can Runic’s Xbox LIVE Arcade re-imagining of the game live up to previous successes, or should we just wait for Torchlight II to land on our PCs later this year?
Game: Torchlight
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Runic Games
Genre: Action RPG
Price: $15.00
Verdict: A must own for anyone who enjoyed Diablo
Cons: AI seems a bit thick initially, but becomes far more difficult as the game goes along.
Review Code Provided by Developer
As one could imagine, given the action-RPG genre’s roots, Torchlight is a fantasy world through and through. Players will wander their way through dungeon after dungeon, all of which contain an amazing and individually unique sense of depth and style. Each stage will take the player deeper and deeper into the caverns below the mining city, and the game’s namesake, as they explore the massive world that exists just below the surface.
The game’s fiction elaborates that settlers in search of a powerful ore called Ember dug these mines in search of the source of this strange minerals power. While extensive time around Ember seems to increase the common man’s strength, magical powers, and even agility, it also has a corrupting property that eventually takes control of one’s brain. This renders otherwise pleasant citizens as nothing more than mindless husks who are puppets to the evil forces hard at work in the heart of the earth. There is only one person brave enough to try and stop them…YOU!
Right out of the gate, players will be tasked with making the most important decision of the entire game: which character class suits you best? Once again, following the archetype defined by Diablo ages ago, there are three well defined classes to choose from: the Destroyer, Alchemist and Vanquisher. Destroyers are the melee heavy brutes, Alchemists are more magical and mechanic minded strategists, and Vanquishers are quick and nimble marksmen who specialize in ranged combat. There is no wrong decision for classes, because every group seems overpowered and well balanced in their own unique way, which further helps to ease the player into the bizarre and unique world on display.
Really, bizarre is the only way that you could really describe the wide variety of enemies one will encounter throughout the quest. Characters can range from a flock of reanimated undead to dragons. But what would a fantasy game be with hordes of indescribable insanity throwing themselves at you like blondes at Mardi Gras? New character models appear the deeper you plunge into the earth, but unfortunately most have studied at the Forrest Gump School of AI battle tactics. This is not to say that all enemies have a case of the short bus syndrome, just far too many of early waves, only to have them all kick up the difficulty to insane levels later in the game.
If there is one thing that Torchlight does better than most games since Diablo, it is offering up enough loot to make you feel tremendously overpowered. Dispatching enemies can cue a potential geyser of gear jettisoning skyward with a gleeful disregard for everything in its path. Random generation of loot drops assure that you will never see the same thing twice, further crippling any gamer who is OCD about having the best gear equipped at all times. There are endless amounts of customization that are at players’ disposal, allowing them to tweak their digital badass until nothing can stand in their way.
An unfortunate side effect of this extensive variety is that quite a bit of actual playtime will be spent navigating though page after page of detailed stats and menus. Granted, the XBLA versions of the user interface have been dramatically refined with console gaming in mind, but for those who are not as keen on loot whoring and making minute adjustments to your character’s DPS (damage per second), this will be a necessary distraction that could be viewed as unwelcome. That said, if a player can’t appreciate character micromanagement, they might as well give up on the entire action-RPG genre altogether, because it is one of the core pillars that help keeps the genre afloat.
Easily the most surprisingly welcome change to Torchlight is the console control scheme, which transforms the game from a PC point-and-clickfest into something more akin to a high octane brawler. Using the left control stick to navigate the character and the right control stick to define the direction of attack works brilliantly to provide a more immersive experience than the game’s non-console counterpart. Attacks and spells are then assigned to the face buttons and triggers, while the mana and health potions are mapped to the bumpers. Not only is this more elegant than fingers desperately scrambling across a keyboard, but it may very well become your control scheme of choice. As blasphemous as this may sound, this provides a far more customizable experience. Not to mention it provides a one-to-one connection between a button being pressed and an attack being performed on screen, further boosting the satisfaction of destroying hordes of opposition.
At its core, Torchlight on XBLA has taken everything that made the original so great and did the unthinkable: it actually made it BETTER for console. In an age of PC gamers with extreme superiority complexes, that may be a tough pill to swallow, but trust us, it is true. This is far and away the best XBLA release of the year and proves that Diablo COULD work on console. Let’s just hope the folks at Blizzard are paying attention, because Runic Games may have just beat them at their own game.
GrE Grade: A
Popularity: 3% [?]
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