Robot Viking

So many levels to plunder.

If you look back fondly on the joys of Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, miss the beauty of a top-down isometric view and relish the delights of massive dungeons full of monsters and loot, then today is a happy day for you. The old-school RPG is not dead! Torchlight has all the delving you could possibly want.

Torchlight is a PC game in the mold of the Black Isle games from ten years ago, or the Diablo series. There’s a plot threaded through your adventures, and your hero gets quests from various NPCs, but at its heart, this is a dungeon crawl. Pick one of three classes (Destroyer, Vanquisher or Alchemist) and head to the town of Torchlight. Torchlight is situated on top of rich deposits of a magical mineral called Ember. It seems like something is tainting the Ember here, however, and the mines are overrun with hordes of monsters.

There are a bunch of really cool things about Torchlight. It’s a single-player game. While I love certain MMORPGs, it’s so nice to just sit down and play and not have to endure 20 minutes of, “lvl 38 tank lfg,” before you can actually get into the action. It’s designed to run on modest computers. There’s even a “Netbook” mode, so you won’t need insane graphics processing or 8 gigs of RAM to play. And it only costs $20. You can buy it and download it from Steam.

Despite the low system requirements, the graphics are actually incredible. In town and dungeon alike you’ll find colorful lighting effects illuminating diverse scenery. It’s refreshing to find a game with such a vivid color palette. When you make attacks, enemies will splatter messily (unless you turn off blood). Magic spells and attacks have splashy effects like coruscating bolts of electricity arcing across the room. The visual style is a bit cartoony, which I didn’t think I was going to like. It turns out it suits the game really well — it comes off like a really well-animated Disney cartoon. I was won over very quickly.

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Each of the three classes obviously has different abilities and attacks, and you also get to choose an animal companion (a dog or a cat). You can stop to fish at fishing holes scattered around the game, and feed any fish you catch to your four-legged buddy for a boost or a buff. One really cool aspect of the game is the ability to share items between characters (which don’t otherwise interact). If you’re running with your Vanquisher and get a melee weapon you don’t really need, you can store it in a communal chest in the town for your Destroyer to pick up later.

Within the dungeons you’ll find all manner of loot, from the obligatory gold coins to armors, weapons, healing and mana potions and scrolls. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s just right for this type of game. What I really like is the magic item customization. Certain items have “sockets” where you can attach magical gems you find. Different gems have different effects once installed in an item, so you can combine different gems and get a nearly infinite variety of combinations in your magic gear.

Speaking of nearly infinite variety, once you’ve completed the main quests, you can continue to explore more dungeons — the game generates random dungeons for you, and you’ll need to explore a bunch of them to hit the level cap of 100. Plus, the game includes some developer tools, so before long the mod community will surely be creating all kinds of new content.

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