Torchlight as a phrase is perhaps the penultimate statement of dungeon crawling, more than hack and slash itself, as without that torch, the other aspects fall behind. Torchlight as a game does not stick quite so close to its name, as the dungeons are not so dark or dank, and actually you have both hands free to wield all manner of weapon. I am but a short ways into the demo, having just reached the exit for level 3, playing as a Destroyer, a character with a torso larger than my body, but legs smaller than my own. Torchlight is very much a cartoon world, it looks drawn, it feels drawn, and the women have a 2:1 bust:waist ratio. However cartoony is a good thing, the lines are mostly clean, the game world is visually well messaged, it is coherent and consistent, and everything seems to be made of "the same stuff." This goes nicely hand in hand with the fact that it seems to be rather simple, graphically speaking. I'm yet to spot any fancy post processing, no screen space ambient occlusion, no depth of field or penumbral wedges; rather the game uses a simple draw distance fogging to enhance a sense of distance (as well as dungeon) and runs great with system requirements on par with, and I am only partially joking, a web browser.
So how is the game? It's Diablo. I mean this in the most positive sense, if you have played Diablo, Diablo 2, Titan Quest or many others, you will be comfortable in Torchlight, and get straight to the excellent feel of the game, and begin hoarding your loot. You click on things you want broken, or want to buy things from with which to break things. You right click on them to break them harder. Of course it goes deeper than this, and I can only speak on one class at the moment, but the interface is nice, particularly in equipping and purchasing. Want to buy something? Shift+click on it in their inventory. Want to sell something? Shift+click on it in your inventory. Want to compare things? Hover them, it will show your current item's stats, and the stats of the item you are considering (and for weapons this is made all the simpler by a DPS calculation prominently displayed); and if you like the way the comparison pans out, right click and it will switch the items out, literally trading places in the inventory. Speaking of places, everything seems to be a single cell in the inventory, which means no more carefully rearranging your inventory to pick up one more item, or shouting at the game "Why can't I rotate this spear? Why do you have it at a 45 degree angle? It will fit at a 90 degree angle, theres enough space!" Combine this with a town stash, and a shared stash (a nice nod to PlugY) and you have far fewer concerns of inventory micromanaging. But wait, theres more, you can send your pet (yes, you have pets, and they can transform by eating fish, it must be the Omega 3s) back to town with things to sell to clear out your inventory, while you keep on... ...torchlighting?
Theres a fair bit more to it, more than I am aware of I know. You have reputation/fame (I ascended to the rank of Unremarkable this morning), there are robotic bards, mercenaries, summons... But for now, I am enjoying the very solid core gameplay; isometric whacking stuff, and collecting the loot that falls. If anything, get it for Matt Uelmen's music.
I do have a few bits to note however, namely in the item drop display. It still has the hold ALT to display whatever is clickable nearby, but it bunches items, so you might see a green Unidentified Ring, but you end up picking up, just to set down a moment later, numerous Leather Boots and Leather Gloves and Rusty Blades, but I might just be doing it wrong, I hope I am. It does seem to suffer more from the Click Past behavior on Diablo, where you are rather confident you click on a monster, but the game interprets it as a navigate command, and will run past the monster taking damage, then stop, then you can click the monster again. I know this is usually largely user error, but it has happened to me quite a bit more than it did in Diablo/2 and Titan Quest. There is also a Click Through situation which comes up from time to time... For example, I rolled over a corpse, who dropped a Town Portal scroll (yes, they actually call them that) and when I held ALT, the label Town Portal appeared, however the label was obscuring some terrain in the distance. When I clicked the label, my character grabbed the scroll, and then ran to that spot on the terrain in the distance. One other thing is in the mines, you can often see rat miners in the distance, chipping away with pickaxes at the rock and minerals, and you can hear them as well, and its all very nice. However from time to time, the sound will play, the particles for the pickax striking the rock will appear, but the rat is nowhere to be seen. Comparatively minor problems for something with thus far, such solid gameplay. I am looking forward to playing the demo more, and I do plan on making a purchase.
Torchlight gets a lot of things right, and so far, nothing quite wrong, just not perfect or optimal. The inventory management is much nicer than what we've seen before, the system requirements are almost adorable, and there are lots of nice touches, such as mentioning AI behavior in the monster hover (flees when allies are killed, immune to knockback, etc) that I wouldn't mind seeing become a standard in the genre. The demo is certainly worth the download, and unless I am missing some hideous horrible problem deep within the very heart of it, definitely worth the $20 (and I hear modding tools are on the way).
