I just put my hands on the new game by Runic Games called Torchlight. Its a diablo-like game with a very attractive graphics and some features from the World of Warcraft like interface layout, talents, soceted items and so on. And – a good news for mages – mana IS restoring in this game, like in WoW (I missed this feature in the original diablo too much!) The visual style also reminded me the World of Warcraft but Torchlight has more advanced picture.

The gameplay is much like Diablo 1. You need to help citizens to fight back an old mine settled by evil creatures. There are 3 classes to play: a warrior, a ranger and an alchemist which is a mage and warlock at the same time because of strong damage spells and abilities to summon demons. You also get a pet, cat or dog on your choice, who will follow you and help to fight the enemies. You also can feed him to transform into another creature or teach special abilities.

Most of the game you spend in the mine. It has many levels and you can travel between them. But the lower you come – the tougher enemies you find. So I don’t recommend you to rush forward until you find some good armor and weapon. By the way, items in Torchlight have different quality and some of them can be improved with special gems that adds more bonuses. So always check twice before swapping a purple item with the green one, because the purple item has a better quality and might have very useful bonuses.

Most of your quest givers are town citizens. So if you go too far it might be a long way back to finish the quest. So you have town portal scrolls that create portals to the town, and when you done they teleport you back to the place where you’ve been. You also have to use identity scrolls to uncover the unknown items. Always make sure that you have plenty of identity scrolls before going back into the mine.

Diablo 1 was very popular because every time you start it, all the levels were randomly generated and you always had different experience. And guess what? - the Torchlight has the same feature. So when you decide to play it again the world will not be the same.

Some rumors says that you should have a chance to create your own underground levels, but I haven’t seen that.

Torchlight is offering a wide range of difficulty levels including the hardcore mode. So you don’t have to be experienced RPG gamer to play it. But if you are the hardcore gamer try hardmodes to get a real challenge.

The game is very smooth and incredibly dynamic. It has thrilling visual effects on spells, fights, casts and so on. The animation is so various and it shows different behavior of enemies. They may panic or even make an ambush on you. Anyway, its hard to describe by words how cool is the graphics so here is the link on some screenshots and videos:

http://www.torchlightgame.com/media/

The only thing I don’t like about this game is the fishing interface. Each time when I don’t hook  anything it pull down a window that tells me about that. And I have to click a button to close it. Thats annoying! So I am not fishing too much.

Well, to make a long story short (it supposed to be a quick note, not a detailed review) I’d like to recommend this game to everyone who like RPG games, especially to Diablo 1 fans because you’ll enjoy to see the same idea with much improved graphics and better gameplay. You can buy the game directly from the developers for just $19.95.

Tags: Game Reviews