Nukezilla Review: Torchlight (XBLA)

It’s Torchlight, but on the Xbox 360. It’s great. Move along.

Oh, you want more? Fine.

All the way back in 2009 a little game called Torchlight was released for the PC. We gave it top marks, and it promptly became many people’s game of the year. With its ability to cater to the dungeon-crawling novice and minimum spec PC, even me and my old laptop could cope with the game and it quickly became a firm favourite.

This year the game came to consoles for the first time, and that was no small feat for it to accomplish. With its point-and-click movement and combat, its mouse-heavy inventory system and its use of more than three keyboard buttons, I had my doubts as to whether its depth could carry over to the Xbox.

If you’re unfamiliar with the game I’ll give you the quick synopsis: “Oh no there’s something evil underground! Hey you, new guy, go down that mine and see if you can find out what’s going on. Feel free to equip yourself with all the mountains of loot you find.”

Then, you and your pet set off into the mines. The labyrinths of each level take you down through several themes, from the dwarven fortress to spider-infested swamplands. You’ll hit the odd boss character and there’s a loose plot that steps in from time to time to remind you there’s a reason for all this (other than the loot). As you go you gain XP, levels, skills, spells and an array of armour and trinkets. All steadily improving as you go.

It’s the simple things

I really enjoy the game’s ease of access and how if, like me, you really don’t care about the specific details of a weapon or piece of armour there’s a very nice labelling system. Scrolling through your inventory there’s either a green arrow or a red arrow. Green means what you have selected is better than what you have equipped and… well you can guess what the other one means. So, once you have backpack full of crap, you can very quickly scroll through deciding what to keep, and what to give to your pet to take back to town and sell.

Equally, if you do want to spend half an hour adjusting everything to be perfect (which you’ll probably need to do if playing on the harder difficulty), there’s plenty for you to sink your teeth into.

You can also swap equipment between your multiple saves. Meaning you can play through a few times on easy collecting the very best weaponry, then have them all at hand when you get the courage to try playing the game on Hard with perma-death enabled (when you die, your character is gone forever).

Torchlight is good at giving you what you want. I wanted an easy time and lots of fun loot, and I got it. I wanted to make steady progress, and I’m happy not to struggle. When I found I was starting to have to use more brain power than I wanted (god forbid I have to actually think about what I’m casting), I just read a quick Map Scroll and hopped into the randomly generated level. This gave me the little XP boost I needed. It’s like grinding, but fun.

Xbox marks the spot … where it stops being perfect

Graphically, it’s hard for me to judge whether it’s an improvement on on the PC version. It looks way better than it did on my old laptop, but it still has very noticeable slow-down when there’s a lot going on. It is a port to the Xbox though, so it’ll never look quite as nice as games that were built primarily for the platform.

The biggest, or at least most noticeable, change to the game is its control scheme. Point-and-click movement has been replaced with one stick moving, whilst the other stick… zooms the camera in and out uselessly. There’s seemingly no way to turn on the spot. Instead of one stick controlling where you face and the other where you move, only one actually controls your movement. This means you have to move, even if very slightly, in the direction you’re firing. A healthy auto-target is built in, but it didn’t stop me having a frustrating few moments every now and again.

You also have the entirety of your vast array of spells forced into four slots (though the D-pad can be used to switch between two sets of four, if you feel so inclined). For me, this was fine. I’m simple when it comes to spells. Just give me a long distance shooty one, an enemy slowey-down one, an AOE one and an explodey one. I gave my pet healing duties. I kept the same setup for the entire game and was fine with that.

If you’re after slightly more interesting combat options then they are there, but it’s a bit of a faff. Those masochistic dungeon crawlers out there will be disappointed, though perhaps less so than you would expect. Then again, they’re masochists. If they didn’t find it agreeable they’d still play.

The menus have also been given a console-isation, though not a simplification. There are a whole bunch of screens to scroll through, and even after eight hours I was still pressing the wrong things. The worst contributor to the Fat-Finger Syndrome this game sometimes gives me is calling up my pet’s commands; it requires you to press Start when viewing the main inventory screen. Nothing should use Start except the pause menu, everyone knows that!

As with the PC version there’s no in-game help, so if you need that extra info you’ll need to pop open your Googles. Whenever I came across something not immediately obvious, I did end up booting up my laptop to work stuff out.

Torchlight remains one of my favorite games, and I’ve put far more hours into the Xbox version than the PC version. It’s a little easier to just pick up and play, and the leaderboards and achievements make it more appealing to those of us who don’t take our dungeons too seriously. But, it does lose some ease of use when it comes to menus, and the graphical slow-downs are a disappointment to see.

Anyone who wants to play Torchlight on the level beyond that which is accessible on the Xbox will have already bought it on PC. For those who remain, the Xbox port is great. It’s simple, it works and it’s a great way to spend your fake Microsoft money.

Disclaimer: Torchlight’s developer, Runic Games, were kind enough to give us a copy of the Xbox 360 version of the game for this review.