While Torchlight has been available for the PC for a long (long!) time, it just came out last week on Xbox 360 as an arcade game. And it is a great game! It’s probably the best value for an Xbox live arcade game so far. I can’t believe how much stuff they fit into that ~400 meg download!
It wasn’t the best story ever, but I thought the story made more sense than Borderlands! The side quests were ok, but I think I “broke” some by going through the area and doing something before I got the quest for it. There were other things where I swear I scoured the whole level, and the thing that was supposed to be there wasn’t there. And I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time looking when there was so much other stuff to do.
The controls were pretty good for a PC to Xbox port, although I think some things, like inventory management, could have been simplified. I accidentally sold or equipped things lots of times because the selection outline and the equipped outline were very similar at first glance. The text in some areas still seemed to be set up for a PC as well, with a really small font that only used up a small area at the bottom of the screen, with the torchlight logo covering the other 70%.
But I can easily overlook any of those nitpicks for this one. About 3/4 of the way through, I felt like I was cheating. Once I started getting really good equipment and skills, I was just destroying things. In most games, as you get stronger, so do the bad guys, so even though you’re now doing 10x the damage at level 10, the bad guys are 10x stronger, so there’s not a lot of difference from level 1. While that was somewhat true in Torchlight, I felt like my character really was a hero. Hacking and slashing and fireballing zombies and dragons and such was awesome fun. I didn’t die until the very last boss monster, as health potions were pretty easy to come by.
The verdict on this one is 100% clear. Spend the points and buy Torchlight. The only thing that would be better would be co-op multiplayer, so here’s hoping for that in Torchlight 2. And here’s to double hoping the Xbox port comes sooner for the sequel, with how well it has done in sales!
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