Publisher: Runic Games
Developer: Runic Games
MSRP: $9.99
by: Katrina "Shadokat Regn" Pawlowski
Torchlight on the PC was an absolute hit when it was released on PC in October 2009. The game is a point and click adventure looting game in the general vein of Diablo 2, only with a certain steampunk feel to it. As a console gamer, I was more than excited to see the transition of this once PC title to the consoles - primarily to see how it would work when transferred from a keyboard and mouse to a controller.
When looking at Torchlight between console and PC, the aesthetics and sound are the same. The town looks the same, the enemies and allies are the same, and the dungeons you crawl through look identical as well. Even down to the ability to feed your pet some fish that you catch in various places that transform it into various other forms (I had the lizard, then it became a lightening elemental, a troll, and I finally settled on the poison elemental).
Where the changes come as expected in a title like this, is in the controller. Hotkeys are mapped by holding the left or right triggers and hitting the X, Y, B, buttons, and you can map various hotkeys to your controller as you go. Magic, basic attacks, and abilities can be mapped to the controller at any time in the menu system. Leveling up your character is a matter of defeating enemies, which fill and XP bar. You’re then able to increase skills like dexterity, health, strength, etc - as well as select individual skills such as heavy melee attack, or magic constant that all use up your mana meter.
One place the console seems to struggle is when you have large quantities of enemies closing in on your character. The system will lag a bit with all that is going on with the screen. In the PC version I was easily able to turn down my graphics to fix this issue (keep in mind I also don’t have a gaming PC), but the console there didn’t seem to be a way to avoid that.
As with the PC version, Torchlight is what you make of it. Play as a class of your choice and melee, shoot, or cast your way through the huge dungeon outside of the town. The game is so nearly identical save for the simplified hotkeys for the controller, that if you already have it for PC you can pass this one up on the console. Unless of course you’re a huge fan, in which case it’s certainly an enjoyable experience.
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