After having put in about 12 hours in to the game so far, Torchlight is wildly entertaining and most enjoyable. You would be wise to spend the 20 bucks on the game, and have yourself a casual RPG experience that looks good, and won’t eat TOO much of your time from a story perspective.
I know there’s many folks out there trolling the boards yapping on about how close this is to Fate, and how it’s a rip off of Diablo. Considering the history of Runic with Diablo, it comes as no surprise they took much of the intellectual design from one of the most important games ever. I’ll admit, I was surprised to hear many musical themes from the Diablo series, and some of the more familiar sound effects too, but I’ll let that slide.
The cartoon-like rendering, and animations are familiar to those who have played World of Warcraft (and I loathe to use it as a comparative reference), but Torchlight’s graphics are very well done. It’s a moody game once you start to descend the levels, and soon enough you don’t realize all the cartoony elements any more (unless you take a moment to stare at the screen). I was particularly fond of the Dwarven areas, as the detail and minor touches on the walls and floors were well done. The levels themselves aren’t too complicated, and yet have some surprises — especially if you decide to run in to a room, and find out there lots more mobs than you could see at first. This is done well by portals that trip if you get too close, and allow a flood of many mobs — some of whom will cause you much grief. Mana and health pots are your friends.
I started off with a Destroyer, a warrior type. At first the game poured on the loot, in fact it was overwhelming at times with the sheer volume of rare & unique items that dropped. As you work past level 20, the loot pinata begins to slow down and puts more focus on the player to pay more attention to the gear. Fortunately you can have two wardrobe profiles to swap around. Gear attributes are straight-forward, and easy enough to figure out.
I haven’t touched the other classes too much, but I have created two other characters. The trees are looking quite good for the Alchemist and Vanquisher, and should offer a fair bit of variety depending on what trees you expand on. No respec is offered, and that may come as a surprise to many out there. Perhaps Runic will cave in to this, and release an update for this — either that or the general modding community will release toon editors.
Over all the experience has been solid. Fun story, easy quests, good loot. While Diablo3 is due to arrive some day in the future, probably when the sky is ruled by flying attack chipmunks, Torchlight’s price & solid game design should occupy your time waiting ever so pleasantly.