RPGWatch Feature - Torchlight Review

[Dhruin]

We look at Runic's popular hack'n'slasher, Torchlight. With a team full of industry vets, does the game deliver enough? Txa1265 tackles the main article with additional comments from woges. Here's a sample:
Reading your class choices might seem disappointing to some - "what ... only three?" - but that belies the depth of character development available through the skill trees. The mage, for example, can be fully developed as a 'pure mage', a summoner, or as a battle mage. As a pure mage, you will be dishing out damage from a distance, keeping yourself protected, and likely using a staff that also provides ranged elemental damage. The summoner will unleash creatures to go forth and take out enemies while your character uses spells or weapons to mop up the remaining foes. A battle mage is capable of both spells or heavily-enhanced melee damage, and is great for those looking to get a taste for both a warrior and mage class simultaneously ... but also somewhat lacking in both of those specialties.
Read it all here. (http://www.rpgwatch.com/show/article?articleid=143&ref=0&id=389)
More information. (http://www.rpgwatch.com/show/newsbit?newsbit=14236)

[Badesumofu]

Good review, enjoyable game.

Woges used 'then' instead of 'than' in the second paragraph of his comment.

There is not much, if anything to add to that review. Charaters and story are not the point of the game at all, so don't buy it if you want a story driven experience with interesting characters. If enjoy ation RPG gameplay, clicking, phat lewt with coloured names to tell you how awesome it is, clicking, and leveling, you will love Torchlight. It does what it does do really well.

[Corwin]

Definitely NOT the game for me!! :)

[Relayer]

"Torchlight is a tough one to pin down for me. The game is solid in all departments but it's not exciting either. It sits at the crossroads being too good for a budget game but not fleshed out enough to compete with bigger ARPG titles"

That seems like a 3 star game to me... just saying.

[Relayer]

Doh, never mind, thought that was a closing comment by Txa.

[Burress]

Woah, did he give Torchlight 5 stars? I liked diablo 1, found diablo 2 fun at first, and liked sacred. But this game was such a pure item and grinding treadmill that I couldn't finish it. The game didn't disguise the stimulation well at all, it was pure reward schedule gaming, and it got old well before I got close to finishing it. I don't know how this can be the game's virtue, at least in my book.

[Zephyr]

Relayer: Sweet looking Tele. I'm a Strat man myself.

[txa1265]

Woah, did he give Torchlight 5 stars?

Whew ... you made me check ... no, it was 4 stars. As you can read in the 2nd opinion, others might go lower. I can see both as potential depending on how you loot at things.

[skavenhorde]

Good reveiw.

It's a fun game. Nothing new, but nothing broken either. I imagine it'll be one of my coffee break games for quite awhile.

[GothicGothicness]

To give this same as KB:AP is just not right.......

[SveNitoR]

Sure it is. They are both very good at what they do. Torchlight is an excellent ARPG. With some story it would've been a solid 4, now it's just a weak 4.

[GothicGothicness]

I played both games, and I have nothing against A-rpgs and I played through the diablos and so on..... but torchlight does close to NOTHING new, which makes it boring and it is just a copy of other ARPG's... story etc is almost none existing and skills developement is average..... a certain 3 in my book. I don't really consider graphics or sounds etc but those are more or less from the stone age.

KB:AP on the other hand... it comes from the series who completely resurrected and saved the entire turn-based genre, and improves on most things from its prequal...........

[dteowner]

I think the "save anywhere" aspect of Torchlight bears mentioning. I never played Fate to know how it dealt with saves, but I know the "finish the level or start over" approach of the Diablos annoyed the heck out of me.

[Burress]

Whew … you made me check … no, it was 4 stars. As you can read in the 2nd opinion, others might go lower. I can see both as potential depending on how you loot at things.

Oops, I didn't notice the stars were filled in with the rather subtle gold color.

[Thrasher]

Nice review, thanks!

It certainly confirms my decision to put it very low on the playlist. I DL'ed the demo, but I have 20 other games that are very much different than a replay of a supercharged Fate.

[txa1265]

To give this same as KB:AP is just not right…….

Personally I *hate* scores - I love doing the 'Buy It / Try It / Skip It' that I do for VGBlogger ... or the no score at all for GearDiary ...

[GothicGothicness]

I understand TXA, the review is quite good... but a lot of people will just read the score...... I think 5 stars is particularly hard, as if a game has some flaws which most games has... it ends up with a 4... however you might feel a game is too good for a 3 so you give it a four.... this could results in games which have a quite big gap between them getting the same score....

However if you don't give scores it would be hard to for example give game average scores like metacritics etc, and also it is hard to knowhow it compares to other games. Given a 10 score scale I think KB would get a higher rating than torchlight from you... of course I am just guessing :D

[DArtagnan]

Personally, I think the game was bland and unimaginative.

Simply not enough meat on it, and all the neat value for money in the world can't make up for simply not being good enough.

But that's just my opinion.

[txa1265]

However if you don't give scores it would be hard to for example give game average scores like metacritics etc, and also it is hard to knowhow it compares to other games. Given a 10 score scale I think KB would get a higher rating than torchlight from you… of course I am just guessing :D

Personally I think Metacritic sucks in terms of scores. Because it implies a mathematical granularity that makes no sense given that most reviewers are 'liberal arts' types with no grasp of numbers … and since one of my degrees is in statistics … well, it drives me nuts.

As for your second surmisal, you are correct. Perhaps in Metacritic terms Torchlight would get a 75.1 and KB:AP would get a 85.0 :D

[GothicGothicness]

Personally I think Metacritic sucks in terms of scores. Because it implies a mathematical granularity that makes no sense given that most reviewers are 'liberal arts' types with no grasp of numbers

Hmm, interesting, but in what way do you suggest we try to summarize what different reviewers think about a game, if not by numbers? I think for most people reading 100 reviews before they decide on a general opinion about a game is not an option....

[txa1265]

Yes, but saying one game is 8.4 and the other is 7.8 and therefore the first is 'better' is meaningless, especially when there is no context, often different sample sizes, population distributions, types of composite scores assigned based on if a site does 1-10 or ABC or whatever... and don't forget that they also disproportionately weight their own 'parent' sites scores - which scores have been shown to be often 'bought'.

Personally I would be happy with a Buy / Try / Fry metric that gives tendencies of thought but forces you to *think* if you want more detail.

[GothicGothicness]

After that it would make an average, like if there is 20 Buy, 1 Try and 2 Fry it would tell you this, and say you should buy? and the game to have the most buy would be the highest rank one? hmm why not? but isn't it kind of the same as A B C ratings? ( almost every site has an explanation of their scores like 1-3 don't buy for the love of god please….. 3-5 Not reccomended…. 5-7 Ok if you like the genre 8 - 9 Strongly reccomended for all except the ones to hate this kind of game. 10 A most own for any gamer no matter what! )

But you would get a kind of unified standard between the websites if they all used Buy / Try / Fry….. it would be very hard to distict a game which every site thinks it worth buying but not that special, from a game which every website things is completely exceptional and a must own by all though……

[Zaleukos]

Personally I think Metacritic sucks in terms of scores. Because it implies a mathematical granularity that makes no sense given that most reviewers are 'liberal arts' types with no grasp of numbers … and since one of my degrees is in statistics … well, it drives me nuts.

Review scores, so messed up that not even the central limit theorem can restore order? :D

[Dhruin]

They're completely different genres - trying to compare scores is a complete waste of time.

[txa1265]

Review scores, so messed up that not even the central limit theorem can restore order? :D

Central limit has assumptions, and having a bunch of math-impaired folks using different metrics creating a population isn't one of them :D

[Relayer]

Relayer: Sweet looking Tele. I'm a Strat man myself.

Strats are nice too.
It's Les Pauls I can't stand! :D

[Relayer]

Personally I *hate* scores - I love doing the 'Buy It / Try It / Skip It' that I do for VGBlogger … or the no score at all for GearDiary …

I actually agree.

There are some games I'd score on the somewhat low side of a grade scale but I still think are great games.

Something like Arcanum is very tough to grade. Poor graphics (even at release), lousy UI, horrible combat engine, buggy. But it's still a must-play title for true RPG fans.

[Oriz0r]

A wiser man than I once stated: "There is no standing in place, if you are not going forward, you are going backward."

That is all.

[cutterjohn]

Nice review, and Mike is right there ARE some additional things, but:
Classes: yeah, Travis added classes the skill trees boil down to about what you had in Fate + expansions excepting some things are now "skills" while others are still "spells" as far as the spell like "skills" go. Still feels alot like Fate char dev to me in the end.

Transmutation: Now this is NEW, but the recipes are pretty limited. (I think that there are about 5 or so altogether, including the gem comboing excepting the gems that don't combo right because they seem to be classed as simple magic items, e.g. Adept Skulls IIRC and similar. (Their descs still say that you cna combo 2 gems of the same kind/type though… but their "title" is green like simple magic items…)

Pets: Yep, just about identical but I think that they lost an item slot in TL, but I'll have to double check later. Plus they added a ferret for the boxed edition and, apparently enabled the ferret mod to work for the dd versions.

Finished up the "storyline" the other day (play a dungeon level every few or so day, so about 2m overall and about 15h IIRC) as an alchemist plus a few levels of the random dungeon(Shadow Vault) just to see what it'd be like. Reminds me alot of Fate quests again, but the loot on the last half of the main dungeon plus Shadow Vault so far seems pretty well meh, lotsa green items, some purple, rarely set item or unique something like 3 or 4 uniques on the last 20 levels for my char and same for set items(none complete some dupes).

Last level was kind of unexpectedly hectic given the pushover that Alric was… kind of funny watching his speech before well you know what he does where he had crit crit crit crit 7452 8997 etc. keep floating above his head… :D (I'm thinking that last level would be fun as the rogue and fighter chars since I had 2 golems, 5 imps, and the regular pet helping to keep the hecticness down while I nuked the final boss with the phaser ba… erk Ember Lance while occassionally sweeping around for mopup.

Still in the end it just doesn't seem to have that appeal to me like Fate did and the expansions, but I suppose that it doesn't help that there are some UI and engine problems like Ember Lance not always triggering and the occasionally massive perf drops on a 2.4GHz Core 2 + 4850(of course this being an ATI card I can't rule out the driver as even the Windows drivers aren't quite as good overall as nVidia, and don't even ask me about their linux catalyst drivers… just waiting for a little more to get finished on the OSS X driver… openGL 3.2 support… only has 1.4 + some 2 right now plus basic GLSL). Also 1.15 seems to have made some of that performance drops worse and there were a few other things that didn't make it seem as nice as it was earlier...