Torchlight

Game: Torchlight
Developer: Runic Games
Platform: PC
Release Year: 2009
Stephen's Rating: 4/10

Basic Plot

The story revolves around an adventurer who travels beneath the town of Torchlight into the Ember mines. A story unfolds which reveals how the Ember (a rare and magical ore) is corrupting the land around it.

Gameplay

Torchlight is an action-RPG similar to Diablo or Titan Quest. The player picks one of three character classes (Destroyer, Alchemist, Vanquisher) and dungeon crawls their way through a rough story.

The player gains levels and assigns skills as they progress and use them to engage more and more difficult enemies.

One original mechanic was that every character had a pet which could be used to assist you in combat, and also go back to town and sell items for you. The player could also fish in ponds and water, and feed the fish to their pet to transform them into other creatures.

Positives
 
The game is extremely affordable. I think I picked it up for $5-10 on Steam. It provides a fairly well rounded action-RPG experience for anyone who isn't patient enough to wait for Diablo III.

Negatives

Having only three character classes was a big minus for me. On top of that some of the skills for one class were often duplicated for another character class, meaning they weren't even unique.

The skills themselves felt weak. The abilities you could learn didn't scale well with the difficulty of the game and often held up the natural flow of gameplay and the story.

The cartoony look of the graphics wasn't a good thing, and the story was really an afterthought.

The items were pretty uninteresting and generic. There was nothing with the "wow" factor you got in Diablo II when finding a unique or set item (or building a runeword).

NO MULTIPLAYER!

Memorable Moments

I played this because of my impatience for Diablo III and my unwillingness to go back and play Diablo II again...