The First Spark

Retro Review

All right, I know I said I'd shut up about Torchlight II, but after finishing the second game, I went back and played the first one again, which left me with a few thoughts I wanted to share. The first thing I noticed after going back Torchlight was how slow my character moved in comparison to Torchlight II. They seriously ramped up movement speed in the second game. Another large difference is that the environments in the first Torchlight 1 largely the same, whereas the environments in Torchlight II were more varied. In the first Torchlight there are 3 classes to choose from, with gender being fixed, which is one less class than there is in Torchlight II, but in Torchlight II you can also choose your gender. The pet system is also included here, which makes managing your inventory a breeze, although there is less options to choose from than in Torchlight II.

Story -

The story of the first Torchlight is a more cohesive narrative than its sequel, but it still doesn't win any awards for originality or for advancing storytelling forward for the medium. There is an evil entity beneath the town of Torchlight. Enter the mines and delve down 30 floors or so to stop the big baddie and save the day.

Graphics - 

The art style of the first Torchlight is still cartoonish, which people decried when it first came out, since people were used to the gothic style of the Diablo games. I remember being impressed with the graphics when I first played Torchlight in 2009, but I had just been playing Diablo II, which was first released in 2002 before that. After playing Torchlight II and going back to Torchlight, the graphics aren't necessarily bad, but you can tell developer Runic Games learned a few new tricks to squeeze some more performance out of the Ogre engine.

Gameplay -

The same click, click, destroy and loot combo popularized by Diablo has been perfected by Torchlight.

Sountrack - 

Matt Ueleman's work is as good as ever here. The theme of the town of Torchlight is very reminiscent to the Tristram theme from the first Diablo. I think the soundtrack to Torchlight II is better, but that's not to say he didn't knock it out of the park here, too.

Replayability- 

Once you beat the game, there is an endless dungeon that opens up, which allows you to continue dungeon delving to your heart's content.

No Scores?

When it comes to review scores for video games they are often inflated as a result of a weird feedback loop between journalists and publishers. Journalists want to get exclusive content before anyone else, publishers want their games to get good scores, so they buy advertising on the sites where they are reviewed. To this end, journalists seem hesitant to rate anything below a 7 for fear of it being perceived as a "bad" game and losing advertising dollars or potential future exclusives. Furthermore, review scores are often used to denigrate the integrity of the reviewer. "Oh, he gave that game a 8, he doesn't know what he's talking about." Without a review score, there is no nice simple number to validate or invalidate the reader's opinion. Besides that, what one person may call an 8, another person may feel is a 7 or a 9. For all those reasons I'll be abolishing the number system for reviews in the future.