Torchlight: What’s the Big Fuss About

If there’s a most talked about game in the last couple of days over the Internet, it’s Torchlight.

Why? The game is good.

What I loved:

The graphics – I’m a sucker for eye candy. But for me, eye candy is not an exclusive characteristic of visually realistic games such as Batman: Arkham Asylum. I like cartoonish and silly art also, especially when it’s pulled off as well as this

Low specs required – Although my main PC is a decent machine, I also play on my laptops, which include an oldie HP computer, which I use for browsing, IMing and the occasional photo editing. So I like that this game can run even in my oldest still used machine.

The price – 16 euros (20 US dolars) for a game with this quality? It’s a win! Even with Steam’s sucky dolar-to-euro conversion, it’s still a bargain.

Made by a small company – Okay, it’s not exactly an indie game, but I still like when I see a small game developer company succeed in this market. It’s harder and harder as time passes, at least for non-casual games and iPhone apps.

Having a pet – Having a furball friend of choice? Cool. Especially when he can carry items and take them to the city to avoid you having to do just that.

It’s a single player game – I’m one of those people who have, in time, become tired of almost every single RPG that comes out lately, being an MMO. I like multiplayer, but I’ve missed single player terribly. Although  Torchlight is going to have an MMO feature later on, its development was made focusing on the single player experience. And right now, that’s a big positive note for me.

It has an official level editor – I like ‘world building’, and this Preditor, as the devs called it, allows me to do just that.

No ‘game’s over, move along’ – This was one of the things I disliked in Mass Effect. Having finished the main quest, I wanted the chance to o around finishing all the side quests and I couldn’t. Torchlight gives you the chance to do that.

Monsters nor scaling with your character’s level – Entirely a personal preference on my part, but I like to feel that when I’ve leveled a bit, I can simply squash the annoying mobs I had trouble killing when I started playing.

Sharing items between characters – Useful.

What I didn’t like:

No save games – I have to admit, one of the things I love doing while playing games is to save the game, try something I find immensely absurd out, see what happens, and, after the probable inevitable consequence of death, reload my last save game. Here you just have the current state of the game. Pity.

Pet pathfinding gone crazy – It didn’t happen often or anything, but my pet decided to have a go at Baldur’s Gate I’ll-keep-walking-into-this-wall-and-surely-I’ll-get-to-my-owner thing.

Too many items dropping – Yes, there is such a thing as too much loot. I like loot as much as the next person, but if the game had about half the item drops it currently does, it would keep chaos off my inventory a lot better. 😉

So, as a conclusion, I like the game a lot. I advise it as a good game for anyone who liked Diablo, is a fan of action RPGs and/or likes fantasy set games.

You cna check out a small gallery of screenshots I took while doing the main quest from start to end (possible spoilers), here.