Reviews

I just completed the main quest of Torchlight playing the Destroyer. It was fun and a one star rating is hardly an accurate rating by ANY standard. Remember that each review is just one person's opinion and all opinions are not created equally, nor are they motivated from the same desires. A company's financial status has nothing at all to do with a game review. sniff sniff…. I smell sour grapes somewhere.

And speaking of fruit… it's misplaced to compare an apple to an orange. If one wants to dress a Barbie doll, they they need to find a game that allows it. Torchlight lets you play as one of three characters and is all about adventure and kicking some serious butt.

Your pet is far from useless. It fights along with you during battles and you can load it up with treasures and send it back into town to sell them! After a minute or two, your pet returns with the proceeds in gold! Another cool thing about the pet is that you can transform it into a number of creatures such as a bat, tunnel digger, gel, demon hound, elemental, etc., by feeding it various fish you can catch at fishing holes. Your pet also increases the amount of treasure you can carry because it has two backpacks to hold extra goodies.

The animation is great. Swing your weapons around in a slicing blow and you can send several enemies flying! They actually go up and then land hard some distance away. Each enemy has their own look, attacks, weaknesses, sounds, death animations, etc, to make it fun to vanquish the bad guys! You can also find gems forged from Ember and insert them into your armor and weapons to increase their power. Weapons and armor can also be strengthened by getting them enchanted in town or at special shrines deep within the tunnels below Torchlight.

Dying is never easy. But in Torchlight, you get a choice of resurrecting in Town (no penalty), at the dungeon entrance (loss of some gold) or right where you were when you bit the dust (loss of experience and fame – ouch!).

Need to make it back to town for more health potions but can't be bothered climbing up the 33 levels of dungeons? Better carry a couple of town portal scrolls with you then.

The monsters get tougher as you progress but so do you. You can learn magical spells and each character can use any weapon or armor but you gain an advantage by sticking to your strengths.

The scope of the game isn't massive. You have one town to explore but many dungeons to traverse in your quest to defeat the evil that is plaguing Torchlight. Although I won't give anything away, the "ending" is satisfying because it ain't easy getting there and it ain't easy to defeat the final foe. Even after you complete the main quest, you can still set out for more adventure on any side quests you didn't complete. Newbies to games like this will find it very intuitive and very easy to configure your keys/spells/items/etc.

If you're looking for a good adventure-style game with great graphics and animation, slick soundtrack and voice acting, challenging baddies and a game you can actually finish in less than six months, get Torchlight! If you want to dress Barbie dolls, this is probably not the game for you. I recommend this to everyone except perhaps the hardcore RPGers.

Incidentally, I provided the voice for the Overseer so perhaps I'm just biased. ;)