Dungeon Crawling 101
Torchlight gives you a choice between three characters. In a nutshell, a hunter, a mage and a warrior. It also offers a number of difficulty settings from easy to very hard and then hardcore mode where death is permanent. The higher the difficulty the better the gold and item drops. The combat is as you would expect from a hack and slash and nothing has changed in that respect. As for the mobs, they level up with you providing an ever increasing challenge, which does a great job at keeping the games flame alive.
The story behind torchlight isn't exactly great, in fact, one could say it's your bog standard good vs evil affair, which would be hitting the nail on the head. Apart from the main story there are several quest giving NPC's that you can grab quests from and also lost dungeon scrolls that can be brought or found that will allow you to visit a dungeon just for loot and leveling up purposes. There is also a guy in Torchlight's town that will periodically give you a quest and a portal to a closed off dungeon with the main task being, go in, kill mobs, grab the quest item and get out. These quests provide XP and fame which is used to level up your character. It's a great addition to the game and it was good that Runic Games decided to put these in as it breaks the game up from being a simple A to B dungeon crawler.
Upon each level gained you have a standard RPG skills tree in which you can apply 2 skill points to any of the three trees for your character choice. You will also get 5 stat points per level to use as you see fit towards better dexterity, strength, magic and so on. Meaning you are able to fine tune your character to your play style.
The graphics in Torchlight are ok, the cartoon element works well and the port over has been (for most part) a success. The odd slow down and graphical tear can be seen though which is a shame as you'd of thought the 360 could handle something like Torchlight with ease at a constant 60fps. Unfortunately that's not the case. Although this is not game breaking in any way at all it still makes you feel a little let down by Runic when it happens.
All in all Torchlight is a very enjoyable dungeon crawler, one that will have you coming back for more long after you've finished the main story.
Well worth the 1200msp.