![]() It can only learn two spells, but the pet AI makes good use of whatever you give it. You can also teach it any of the spells learned from scrolls. Your pet doesn’t just serve as a pack mule, though, or even as simply a meat shield. Doing so really helps keep the game flowing because like any good hack & slash game, you’ll pick up a lot of loot, and going back to town to sell it is annoying. The pet also has an inventory, can be directed to pick things up, and can be sent back to town at any point to sell loot. Your pet levels up along with you, and it can wear two rings and a necklace, which is nice. You can catch fish and feed them to your pet to change them (temporarily or permanently) into another animal/monster, and I was overjoyed to see that Torchlight doesn’t make you waste inventory space on a fishing pole to do so. I loved having that ability, because it allowed my barbarian to cast town portal spells and identify magical items skills that many RPGs restrict to the magician class.Īs in Fate, your character is constantly accompanied by a pet dog or cat. In addition, there are magic scrolls, found as loot or purchased, that allow you to teach certain skills to any character. I appreciated that, since I wanted my summoner to dual-wield pistols – something he’s not necessarily good at by default. I could have put my points into casting spells, though, and been more similar to the Sorceress.Įach class has three skill trees, although certain skills like “ranged weapons mastery” show up in the trees of all classes. For example, my first character was a magician who focused almost entirely on summoning, similar to Diablo II’s Necromancer. There are three character classes (essentially, a barbarian, a ranged character, and a magician), each of which plays very differently from the others, and each of which can be viably developed in several ways as you level up. It takes good ideas from the developers’ previous games and improves on them in just about every way possible. Torchlight may only be above average in the story department, but its gameplay is outstanding. Instead, I think it’s pretty standard for action games. I don’t think of this as a significant problem, though. The same can’t really be said of the sidequests, which follow the exact pattern from Fate: your task is always to kill a specific boss and/or retrieve a specific piece of loot, with little real reason given. The writing is miles better than that of many other hack & slash games I’ve played as well. It’s not the deepest story in the history of RPGs, but it is clear that the developers put real effort into it. As you move down through the dungeon, you learn that Ember has a corrupting effect on any who use it, and has led to the downfall of a number of civilizations before yours. In Torchlight, you are drawn to a town, also called Torchlight, where a magical ore called Ember is mined. That is truly the only complaint I have about this game, and this is not a review of Steam, so it’s the last you’ll hear of it. I am here to tell you that there is only one thing I don’t like about Torchlight: its delivery method. Torchlight may share a genre with them, but it does not share their problems. Of course, if you read those reviews, you will also notice that while those games did some things right, they were far from flawless. All you have to do is look at my review of Alien Syndrome or Fate to know that I am a big opponent of criticizing them for being what they are supposed to be. In fact, I must admit that I love them enough that I’ve played some stinkers and still enjoyed them to a certain degree. This is far from the first time I’ve said so, but I love hack & slash games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |