Tag Archives: torchlight

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Shower of Giblets (Hack'n'Slash)

Torchlight is a Great Little Game

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Happy weekend all!  Pike here.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately, and I do apologize for that.  The truth is that I’ve been having an obscene about of fun with the lastest WoW expac so I’m playing a lot of that.

Today, however, I thought I would give something new a shot and I booted up Torchlight, which I have somehow never played before.  And I promptly wound up playing it for the next few hours, because it was just that addictive.  For the few of you who haven’t played it, it’s an action-RPG along the veins of Diablo, and it is just wonderful.  You can pick from three classes and I promptly picked alchemist because the guy is wearing goggles, and I think I made the right choice.  I love hurling poison bolts at my enemies from afar, watching them all expire, and then going around and collecting all sorts of great loot.  It’s simple, straightforward, and a whole lot of fun.

Also, one of the questgivers is a steampunky robot.  I approve.

The sequel recently came out and I look forward to playing that as well, but for now I’m having a blast with the original!  Anyone who hasn’t looked into this series should really do so.  It is well worth the price!

The official Torchlight website is here: http://www.torchlightgame.com/

And now, here is a cat picture, because it’s always time for cat pictures:

Cats are also the best choice of pet in Torchlight.
The Android Collects Random Objects (Adventure), The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Shower of Giblets (Hack'n'Slash)

Torchlight 2

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In between huge bouts of WoW and considerable addiction to FTL, I’ve also been playing the long-awaited release of last week, Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a widely lauded game, and rightly so, of the Action RPG genre – which is to say a Diablo clone. Indeed, Runic Games was formed partly by exiles from the Diablo 2 team and this shows in a variety of ways. I was rather late to the TL bandwagon but I had a blast with it recently, and the polish and love of Diablo was present there too. It wasn’t a perfect game, but I would argue it had shortcomings rather than flaws, and that these shortcomings were deliberate choices made in order to ensure a polished final product. Entirely reasonable and indeed much more commendable than overstretching limited resources and doing nothing properly.

Torchlight 2 however has had the budget, built on the success of the first game, to try to overcome those shortcomings and so far I have to say it looks as though it has succeeded fairly comprehensively. It’s a far larger game, with a much greater variety of locations. It has one more class, and all four classes seem somewhat more malleable in playstyle than the previous iteration’s. I will admit that I would have liked to see more classes still, and I’ve heard reports that the game isn’t properly balanced for every playstyle (e.g. berserkers can have an especially hard time, I hear, when enemy damage starts to ramp up). There are more items, more characters, more locations, just plain old fashioned more of everything, but in my own play experience the game’s polish hasn’t suffered for for the increase in quantity.

Sweetie Belle explains the appeal of ARPGs with commendable succinctness.

Bearing in mind I’m not tremendously far through the game yet, everything so far seems to sparkle with both polish and love and it’s just a really good, satisfying game that lets you carve through hordes of monsters in order to get experience points and loot. It’s not a complicated concept, but it is what we humans like, so it’s not like there’s much room for complaint about it.

The game also has multiplayer, the absence of which was by far the original’s greatest and most bizarre shortfall, but I’ve not yet had the chance to mess around with it. Pike and I are planning on some playing soon though so if anything about it is striking I shall report to you all.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Distracted Boss (Casual/Flash), The Android's Fellow Robots (Multiplayer), The Android's Shower of Giblets (Hack'n'Slash)

ARPG

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With all the hubbub around Diablo 3 lately it’s probably been lost, but the Action RPG genre is actally a thriving one, with several exciting things on the way. I thought I’d quickly run through a few on the horizon in this post, so those of you who don’t already spend too much time hunting for loot can begin to do so!

First up we have Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a great little game, if lacking in a couple of areas, and the sequel looks likely to tidy up pretty much everything that was criticized to make for a great experience.

Next we’ll look at Grim Dawn. Grim Dawn is coming from Crate Entertainment, founded by folks from Iron Lore who worked on the fairly well-regarded Titan Quest. I’ve not played that myself but I got it in the Steam Sale so I will be giving it a look soon, but everything I’ve seen about Grim Dawn has me very very excited. Grim Dawn is also promising an open world where you can wander into trouble long before you’re prepared to deal with it, which sounds like a pretty promising angle to me, and the whole exploration side of things will hopefully be played up!

Taking a slightly different approach is the online-only Path of Exile, which gave us a truly glorious image of a skill tree I shall show you in a moment; it really puts Diablo 3 to shame. At any rate it’s another promising-looking ARPG on the way, and one whose funding through microtransactions looks to be backed up by people who have actually got a notion of why microtransactions cause some problems, and are trying to avoid them.

Meanwhile, in Spira…

There are also people trying new things in the genre, such as Nyrthos, being made by some Czech czaps which is aiming to be playable in browsers and on iOS. At first I was skeptical about that, but upon reflection, if they can get the pacing down properly, that might just work – ten minutes of ripping through baddies on your lunch break or on the bus could actually be a whole lot of fun. We’ll have to wait and see!

So if you like sitting around all day clicking the mouse incessantly and weighing up whether your new Chastity Belt of Frustration +3 is better or worse than your Codpiece of the Equine King then it seems like there are going to be a heck of a spread of options in the coming months! Tell us in the comments what you’re excited for, and let us know if we’ve missed any!