Torchlight
In an effort to reduce my backlog, I was paging through all my XBLA games that I've yet to finish. Since this was alphabetical, Arkadian Warriors was one of the first I came to. I had fond memories of it (even though I only ever got to level 2), so I started it up. About ten minutes later I shut it down in disgust and started up Torchlight, which is what Arkadian Warriors wished it could be. Those missing ten minutes are best left undescribed.
Torchlight is, at its heart, a Diablo clone; which makes sense since it was made by the same developers. The great thing about this game is that I can do a full write up of it 1 floor into its 35-floor campaign, and my reaction would be exactly the same as if I finished the whole thing. Aside from slight aesthetic changes in the walls and new spells you get, there is no difference in the game as you play on.
This is what you do:
- Gather 4 quests in town.
- Go into the dungeon
- Press X a lot.
- Press A when you aren't pressing X, to pick up all the loot that's raining from the bloody corpses.
- Don't look at any of the loot you pick up until your character complains their spine is snapping and can't carry anymore.
- Spend 20 minutes paging through all the items you found, identifying and comparing.
- Lob all of the useless crap (usually everything) onto your poor pet and send it to trudge up x number of stairs back to town to sell your shit.
- Pick up the items for all four quests on one floor, teleport back to town.
- Turn in all quests and put all your bright and shiny orange epic awesome weapons and armor your character can't use because they aren't a warrior/marksman/pansy mage into a chest with the thought you will use these on another character. In reality they will all rot there, untouched.
- Rinse and repeat.
Or simply put:
- Kill.
- Loot.
- Sell.
Now while this seems negative, it's actually an awesomely addictive formula. Though most everything you pick up is crap, just like in Diablo, they've calculated the exact percentage of amazing items so you find one JUST when you're getting sick of all the mundane junk. Because the game is shorter than Diablo, you go through upgrades quicker, which is even more exciting. It is excellent, mindless fun. And I do mean mindless, because you will never find a scrap of characterization or storytelling in this, nor should you. It isn't that kind of game. I'm a story junkie and even I skipped every flimsy cutscene trying to explain a reason that my suicidal character kept plunging deeper towards the hell underneath the town rather than just retire off the four billion gold I had amassed already.
The fact that I actually completed Torchlight is a testament to it standing apart from Diablo or Diablo II. I never finished those. I thought the controls were clunky and the aesthetic was so depressing drab, and I got bored quickly. Torchlight's distinctive art style and incredibly fluid Xbox 360 controls made it bright, appealing, and a huge pleasure to play.
I only got 20 fame levels out of 33 (you get fame for killing minibosses, not that anyone really knows what you're doing 500 feet below them, so really I should be able to saunter out of there saying I just killed a thousand of the bastards and level up instantly), and that's the only achievement I'm missing. While this is one of the only games where grinding the next few hours for fame doesn't actually sound like a bad idea, I'm going to put that on the back burner and focus on finishing another game.
Wait...the next game on my finish pile is GTA IV. Maybe I'll go back to Torchlight after all.
