Review | Torchlight

Format: PC | Genre: Action RPG | Publisher: Runic Games | Developer: Runic Games | Release date: 27/10/09 | RRP: £15

By Lewis Denby

How do you sit down to review something like Torchlight?

It might sound like an easy gig: it’s a no-brains-required, click-on-everything-until-it-dies action RPG, a spiritual successor to Fate that follows in the footsteps of so many dungeon-crawlers of years gone by. But the complete and utter intensity of the whole thing makes it exciting and draining in equal measure. I can barely type this article without smashing my mouse to pieces trying to kill all the letters that are popping up on-screen. Number fives keep appearing as I try to hotkey up a big health potion. Some might say Torchlight is fundamentally flawed, but its flaws also become its greatest strengths. It’s absolutely barmy. It’s a load of fun.

The village of Torchlight is being attacked by hideous creatures from the depths beneath. Warriors are entering the mines but never returning. A strange, powerful essence seems to be behind the mayhem. That’s about as conceptually deep as Torchlight gets. There is no pretence of the game being anything other than an excuse to hack, slash and shoot your way through endless reams of foes until your index finger is bruised and blue.

Its role-playing system is similarly thin. You assign experience points to combat, combat, combat or magic, which aids in combat. Similarly, fame points are invested into additional skills that range from new ways to beat the living daylights out of enemies, to new ways to summon a spectral figure to beat the living daylights out of enemies on your behalf. There’s very little respite, and when it does arrive, it’s usually in the form of a brief cut-scene with dialogue you can’t influence. It’s kill, kill, kill all the way.

It’s totally a dungeon-crawler. As in, you crawl a dungeon, literally, for about 95 per cent of the game. The further five per cent is divided between the village above, and a minute selection of side-quests that drop you into slightly different dungeons. Those gain you extra skill points to spend on your fighting finesse back in the main dungeon. The town up-top is where you trade items. And that’s just about it.

//Levelling down
Initially, you expect it’s going to get old really quickly. And to start with, it kind of does. Each section of Torchlight’s underworld is divided into a number of levels, one below the other, all rendered in the same visual style and each taking anywhere between a few minutes and half an hour to complete. When you’ve been smashing your way through what feels like (and essentially is) the same location set to repeat for a couple of hours, it becomes wearying. A few hours into Torchlight and you’re desperately praying it’ll shake things up soon. And really, it doesn’t, in any significant way, for the remainder of the game.

But what it does, cleverly, is smoothly ramp up the intensity, turning the volume and ferocity of enemies up to ten and then far beyond, until Torchlight becomes a sort of frantically hypnotic bundle of sheer madness. On a number of occasions, you can honestly barely see the floor, thanks to the ludicrous number of bad guys littering the crypts at once. And their attacks start to overwhelm too: combat is accompanied by a satisfying amalgamation of flying colours that render the screen in fabulous rainbow hues. One boss battle around seven hours in saw the entire display turn purple.

As such, the difficulty level is somewhat curious. On normal, it took a good few hours for anything to pose a threat at all. By the time the pressure did rise, I’d built up a stock of 30-odd health potions and enough gold to buy a hundred more. Torchlight throws loot at you like nobody’s business, and the chances of you ever running low on anything are enormously slim. The worst case scenario is having to summon a portal back to the surface to buy more stock with your thousands of coins, or send your pet – either a cat or a dog, depending on your choice at the start of the game – back to Torchlight to flog some items on your behalf.

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