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101 of 104 found the following review helpful:
 DIABLO III: THE PG VERSION Jan 14, 2010
By NeuroSplicer
This game sure comes with some serious pedigree: Travis Baldree, designer of Fate, and Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer, co-designers of Diablo I & II put their heads together and came up with an action hack&slash isometric RPG game that can appeal to all ages. The result is a good game that will keep us hacking and summoning - until the ...3rd coming that is.
In fact, the game developers made sure to often pay tribute to the DIABLO Series: from the background music while at the town-camp (you would recognize those Tristam guitar riffs anywhere!), to the draining health and mana fountains and to the voice announcing & warning, you cannot miss the timeless DIABLO influences. Having said that, I found TORCHLIGHT to be something between a DIABLO and a FATE game.
If you have experienced any of the FATE games you will be reminded of them often, although the heroes here are not children. The village NPCs will keep giving you straightforward quests (usually a go-and-fetch excuse to dwell deeper into the dungeon). Extra dungeons, however, can be accessed by accepting the extra quests of the male NPC in the south and by purchasing dungeon maps of various levels from the local merchants. Also, sometimes a spectral animal appears while in a dungeon: slaying it will open up a bonus dungeon where better equipment often becomes available. There is no traveling to/from town while in a bonus dungeon, so you better keep an empty inventory before entering it.
Yes, you do get a pet (a dog or a cat - but you can interchange them by purchasing and feeding them a special fish) and, yes, you can transform them by feeding them different types of fishes. Fishing is carried out in pretty much the same fashion: you wait for two concentric circles to merge and their color to change from pale blue to purple but it is less important than it was in FATE (so far I brought in nothing else but fish - no equipment or valuable items).
Now, when not playing an AD&D RPG (where I always choose to be a Paladin), I like to play other RPGs as a warlock, a fighting mage. The Alchemist class allows you to both cast powerful spells and exchange blows in the midst of the action (the other available classes is the Destroyer and the Vanquisher). The Destroyer is the up-close-and-personal tank warrior whereas the Vanquisher is the ranger.
When leveling up as an Alchemist, make sure to get both the (steampunk!) golems and the Ember Strike spell. Together with some good shielding spells, nothing can stand in your way.
Try not to go broke. At first I though, "finally, an RPG that is not stingy with its money". But that was only at first. Items are less expensive at the shops but (surprise!) they also sell for a pittance. The good news is that money drops like rain from slain foes. The money-hole is the enchanter: attempting to further enchant your equipment will deplete your funds faster than you would imagine! And you also run a considerable risk of having all of its enchantments removed. No post-dated checks are honored. No credit cards accepted. I tried.
You WILL get swarmed so be prepared. Place healing potions, defensive and knockback spells on quick-slots (1-0); equip your pet with self or group healing spells and a powerful summoning spell; and never forget to first stay alive and then keep pounding on your enemies. In the heat of the battle it is best to deactivate (Alt-key) the fallen-items labels (more on this later on) and to always keep an eye on your health and mana levels. Respawning is not free: it will cost you either time, money or experience.
The inventory seems small but, in fact, it is more than adequate. Potions and scrolls are stackable up to 20 and (more importantly) every item takes up only one inventory square (no, you do not have to carry your fishing pole, it is just there).
You can send your pet to town to sell off its inventory and the time it needs to return is much less that what it did in FATE.
And there are treasure rooms you can only access by finding and pulling levers (sometimes in specific sequence) to open doors or turn bridges.
Now, some negative points:
(1) the game is only a dungeon crawler, there are no outdoors locations.
(2) the graphics of the the spells are very impressive but they can become really confusing as well. Even at maximum settings, unless the fallen-items labels are deactivated you will not be able to actually see much of the battle. That means alternating between fighting and looting - but it also means missing some important interactive objects (levers or ballistas). Also, when electric, fire, ice and poison spells get mixed the result is not something one can discern friend from foe in. It makes no tactical difference (you cannot harm yourself or your company) but it sure would be more enjoyable if you could aim more than...80% of the time.
(3) the environments are beautifully designed but your path is often blocked by obstacles that visually you could easily bypass. Sometimes you find your hero running in place, stopped by a ...pebble.
Finally, some closing suggestions to the developers for a future patch: (a) add the possibility to order our pet to bring back potions and identification scrolls when sent into town, and (b) make it possible to change class in mid-game (keeping the level and redistributing the skill points).
All in all, TORCHLIGHT is a very enjoyable experience. It is easy to master, it is beautiful and it is fun for the whole family.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
50 of 54 found the following review helpful:
They left in the fun and took out the other stuff. Jan 15, 2010
By Arthur Kimes
I've been playing this type of game since Wizardry came out on the Apple ][. And this is about the most entertaining dungeon crawl I've ever dove into!
I don't want to spend time telling you what kind of game this is. You know that. I want to point out how REFINED this is. The developers know what you like and what's annoying. Stuff you like (loot!, violence!, MINIONS!!) is plentiful. Stuff you don't (long cutscenes, stupid storylines, micromanagement) is gone.
Bash Monsters in the style YOU like. Snipe from long range? You can do that. Tear them apart in axe-to-face combat? You can do that! Swarm them with legions of undead minions? YOU CAN DO THAT! Go all John Woo - blazing away with a pistol in each hand? YOU... CAN... DO... THAT!!! You can even switch between those styles (and many more) with the SAME CHARACTER. You develop the character the way YOU want - because it's more fun that way!
It runs well on older systems (even netbooks!) and beautifully on newer ones.
It's well supported. There is a vibrant user community supplying a plethora of mods. Steam has a long list of achievments you can shoot for (I don't know if you can hook into the achievements if you don't buy the game through Steam).
You got the idea. I gotta go. My alchemist has a bone to pick with some poison-spitting spiders. Actually, his ZOMBIES do - but you get the idea.
34 of 36 found the following review helpful:
Excellent RPG by the original Diablo crew ... Jan 14, 2010
By No*BoUnCe
I am about 50+ hours into this game, and I must say that it is one of the best RPG's I have played in a long time. I purchased this game from STEAM a month ago when it was on sale, but just wanted to let potential buyers know how great this game is.
It is my understanding that many of the original developers from the Diablo 1 & 2 games (including the music person) have migrated over to Runic Games to make this fantastic RPG. Anyone familiar with the Diablo games will instantly recognize the music, the menus, and the gameplay ... but with many refinements and upgrades. The graphics are very nice, the music if fantastic, the gameplay is addictive, the quests are fun, and there is an abundance of loot to collect.
A nice plus that I like with Torchlight is that when you exit your game and return at another time your character is at the same location and your progress picks up at that point ... no starting from town everytime like in Diablo 2. If you leave a town portal open upon exiting, it will be there when you come back. Another revision with Torchlight is if your character dies, you now have a few options to chose from on how you want to respawn (from the exact spot where you died to back in town) ... no more repawning back in town regardless and having to slog your way back to where you died to get your stuff back like in Diablo 2 ...
A demo is available to try out before buying if interested ... just Google search for it.
I highly recommend this game ... It's a great value even at it's retail price.
13 of 14 found the following review helpful:
 A wonderful, simple, and possibly addicting game Jan 23, 2010
By Nate is my fake name
"Nate"
This review is for the Steam version--I do not know if the retail requires activation. This review will be done in a different format than my other game reviews. Scores in each section are out of 5.0 stars. My apologies for the length; I can't seem to write short reviews.
Torchlight is a new entry into the Diablo-style hack'n'slash genre of games. While it may seem derivitave, it bears mentioning that some of the team behind this game also worked on the actual Diablo games, and one of them is the guy behind Fate.
Customization (3.5):
Not much here to start with--three class archetypes to choose from (melee, ranged, or mage). Each character has their own brief backstory. I played as the melee class; my wife is playing as the ranged class, which involves both bows and guns. More customization comes in upgrading your character--each one has three different skill tracks to upgrade. Personally, though, I would argue that this game's REAL customization potential is in the loot. This game is loot-heavy. Some items have slots that you can upgrade with runes. In town, there is an enchanter (which as another reviewer mentioned is the real money-sink in this game), and also an NPC who can combine duplicate runes into better ones. Some loot is in "sets" that provide bonuses the more pieces you have equipped, though I've found mish-mashing stuff I find to be the best way to go.
Graphics (3.5):
Colorful. Vivid. Confusing. The enemies will swarm you (load up on AoE skills!) and it can often be hard to tell exactly what's going on, but a few clicks of said AoE skill can usually clear them out fairly easily. For those playing on non-gaming netbooks, there is a "Netbook" option under settings that makes it much more playable (we tried this with the demo on my wife's computer before I bought it on mine, and it seems to work well).
Pet (3):
The pet is an interesting mechanic. The fish you can find throughout the game (via, well, an easy-to-grasp fishing mini-game) can be fed to your pet for temporary transformations or stat boosts. These will greatly increase your pets HP, and bestow temporary abilities depending upon the type of fish consumed. They generally last for 120 seconds, though there are variations. Perhaps the most useful aspect is the ability of the pet to run to town and sell stuff in its inventory, which is just as big as yours. Due to the decently high drop rate of potions, the only thing that really might make you go back to town in the middle of a dungeon is using up identify scrolls. You CAN learn an ID spell, though it takes up one of your 4 spell slots.
Gameplay (3):
The real measure of a game. The gameplay here is not deep, thoughtful, or difficult. The enemies--even most bosses--are pretty easy to kill. This is not a criticism per se--I downloaded the demo before purchasing this game, so I knew exactly what to expect. When it comes to games, I'll play a certain game for weeks on end, tire of it for a while, then play something else in a different genre. This is a simple game, but the dungeons go on for a VERY long time. I played through and "beat" the story (which ends on about level 35-40, I can't recall exactly). I'm playing other things now, but I still bring this game up when I want some mindless loot-grinding. It's a good game to kill some time while waiting for my wife to get ready if we're going out (she feels the same away about when I'm getting ready!). Even though the main quest is completed, there are still NPCs outside of a secondary, more difficult dungeon (the Shadow Vault) that are giving me quests.
Bug, Glitches, Issues:
A relatively common one I've found is enemies and the loot they drop getting stuck in walls or behind objects that appear transversable but are not. To my knowledge, no patch has been released addressing this, though if I am mistaken, please let me know. Occasionally your pet will get stuck and trail behind you, though this is easily fixed by doubling back and running in a little circle usually (though it is rather annoying). The save mechanic uses (in the Steam version, and when connected) the Steam Cloud. HOWEVER: The game does NOT require an internet conenction to play, or save. I've found the best thing to do when done a session is open a town portal, and go into town. The game saves, will reload you into town the next time you open it, and your portal back into the dungeon will remain there. I've had several game-killing crashes (which on reloading means I start at the beginning of a dungeon floor), though this is not prevalent enough to make the game unplayable.
All in all, for a game that had a development-to-market cycle of 11 months, with an engine built from the ground up in this time, Torchlight is still surprsingly well-done. The cost--$20 (I got mine for $10...a week later it was $5 in the holiday sale! Oh well)--seems reasonable (if not, wait for another sale, it's sure to come!). This game can definitely cause the "just one more turn!" (or dungeon level, or boss, in this case) mentality, but it is also easy to pick up and play for an hour without having to invest much thought or effort in it. If you liked Diablo, Fate, or just the dungeon crawling, loot-grinding genre in general, this game is a can't-miss.
3.5 / 5 Stars Total (I wish Amazon allowed 1/2-stars).
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Diablo IV May 17, 2012
By Gregory Bartz
"Gregorius"
It's been a long-running joke/acknowledgement in the gaming world that no matter what Vivendi puts on the boxes of its games, "Hellgate London" has always been the "true" Diablo III, and Blizzard/Vivendi's recent disaster would always be "Diablo In Name Only". Unfortunately, the publishers of Hellgate London decided to put it on store shelves before the developers were done with it, it kind of sucked, and it sank into obscurity among everyone who wasn't keeping up with the internal politics of Blizzard at the time. Fortunately, the team that made Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo III: Hellgate London has reunited to bring us "Diablo IV: Torchlight", and this time, they were allowed to actually finish what they started. In fact, Torchlight is more or less a remake of the original Diablo with more advanced graphics. The original three character classes are here, but they've been renamed: the Warrior is now called the Destroyer, the Rogue is now called the Vanquisher, and the Sorcerer is now called the Alchemist. We've gone from Diablo II's multi-act structure back to the original single-town approach, but the town has been renamed from Tristram to Torchlight. Unfortunately, multiplayer seems to have been overlooked, but that's going to be fixed in the upcoming "Diablo V: Torchlight 2".
So that's really what you're getting: Diablo 1 with modern graphics. Who can complain about that?
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