Guess what happens when you establish a mining colony on top of a huge pile of magical crystals? If you guessed "nothing, everybody just mines the crystals and grows rich on the profits with no side-effects at all", then you're clearly not built for games design.
Torchlight — which is both the name of the game and the town that sits above the aforementioned mine — is a town living with a number of incursions of beasties from the mines and caverns that lie beneath its soil. In the best clichéd fantasy tradition, you're a sole warrior sent in to clean up the mines, one monster at a time. In other words, the plot is rubbish, but who cares? There are big scary monsters to cleave in half and lots of shiny loot to grab!
Torchlight is an action RPG that owes more than a small debt to Diablo — and that's no coincidence, as many of the same designers who work at Runic games were original Diablo designers as well. If you've ever played Diablo, you know what you're in for. Lots of dungeon crawling, clicking on enemies to unleash attacks and spells, and plenty of loot up for grab
Torchlight does deviate in a couple of interesting ways. When you first set up your character, you select a pet to travel with you; either a fierce looking canine or equally terrifying looking feline. Your pet can be instructed to attack your foes or defend you, and you can equip most of the bits of loot that would fit you onto your pet, including teaching it spells. The pet also removes one of the more tedious bits of most loot gathering games, namely inventory management. Run out of space in your inventory in most games, and you've got to trek out of dungeons and sell the lot off, wasting precious monster-bashing time. Your pet handles this task for you. Simply drop an unwanted bow, chestplate or rifle into your pet's inventory, try not to think too hard about how it's possible for a cat to carry a blunderbuss and in a single click your pet will bound away and back to town, selling all your excess loot.
With inventory management out of the way, Torchlight concentrates much more heavily on combat, which is flashy and at least initially quite satisfying. It's very bright and shiny, with spells that dazzle, monsters that explode in clouds of poisonous gas and equipment that changes your look with every new piece. This can be something of a drawback in the most hectic battles, as it's rather easy to lose your place while clicking sometimes.
I tested Torchlight on an iMac Core i7 model with a mouse, and while it should technically play on a Macbook/Macbook Pro, the touchpad might not be the best way to ensure fast interactions. While the game supports both Steam Cloud and Steam Play, the game saves themselves aren't cross platform, and Mac users don't get the level editor offered to PC users, which is mildly annoying. Still, if you're a fan of epic dungeon adventures, Torchlight is well worth your money. A demo is available through Steam that gives a good indication of how the core game plays, allowing you a taste test in any case.
