Your hero travels to a small town called Torchlight, located near a source of a mysterious ore known as Ember, which has the power to enchant or corrupt. Hordes of creatures live beneath, and you will plough through them all.
Torchlight is often deemed a "Diablo clone". It is a hack-and-slash game with lots of loot, through randomised levels. The levels seem to follow templated blocks so you will often see familiar areas. The cartoon style graphics look nice.
You choose between three characters which are essentially a warrior, rogue, and mage.
You click (or hold) to attack where your mouse is pointing, and shift holds your character in position. Spells and potions can be assigned to the number keys.
When you level up, you have 5 attribute points to assign: strength, dexterity, magic, defence, as well as a skill point. Defeating strong enemies gives you Fame which also gives you one skill point.
The main quest sees you progress through the caves floors, with the theme switching every several floors. Each floor features hordes of enemies then a few stronger enemies. Some floors feature a boss and then unlocks a teleporter to easily return. You can teleport out to town before you reach these checkpoints by using a spell or a scroll.
You periodically need to return to the town to sell your loot and store items in the chest. There's a few side-quests which just involve going to a different dungeon and working your way though similar floors.
You briefly have a partner near the start of the game, but most of the game is you and your pet animal. The animal attacks, can transform when you feed it fish, and can carry loot. You can send them back to the town to sell what they are carrying, then they will return a couple of minutes later with gold. With the amount of teleport scrolls you find, you may as well just return to town alongside them.
The loot is a bit too plentiful which means you end up going into your inventory to see if you have anything decent, and frequently go back to town to sell it. Many items need an identify scroll to actually see what it does which further slows the game down. Items can have several bonus traits like boosting your main attributes like Strength, or add magical resistance/damage. Sometimes items have one or more slots for gems which also add similar modifications. There is a guy in town that can fuse 2 similar gems together to create a single upgraded version. Gems can be removed from items at the cost of destroying the item, or you can destroy the gem if you want to replace it.
The game gets repetitive really fast. I don't mind the idea of having multiple floors with the same theme before switching, but I think the floors are too big, or maybe it's the fact they contain too many enemies. If I have mauled down 50 goblins, do I really need to keep proving myself against 50 more? Then on the next floor, it's the same enemies but maybe 1 level higher, but you are probably 1 level higher, and then might have better equipment and a new skill - so it is probably easier. There was one point I thought I'd do some of the optional dungeon side-quests but then I was in the exact same cave theme that the main quest was using so there was no variety. The difference was that the enemies were stronger in level, which meant when I went back to the main quest, it was now even easier than what I had just accomplished. Then when I got to the fire themed area and there were totally different enemies, I thought it would be a nice challenge, but it was so easy, I had to hover over my health bar to check they were doing damage - it was so minute, it wasn't enough to update the visual. I did wonder if I made it easy by investing loads of points into defence. However, when the theme switched again, the enemies were rapidly depleting my health. I did see many message board threads commenting on this difficulty spike which mainly is due to the "Dark Zealot" enemy who has powerful ranged magic.
Once you have about 5 skills, you will just be investing points into these, so there's not really any change of strategy throughout the game.
When there are 3 characters, and the game has features like a "shared chest" which encourages you to replay, it seems odd that the game is so long. It took me about 16 hours to get through, so I wasn't enthused about replaying it at all. There's even a new hard dungeon after you complete the main storyline.
Torchlight seems to be a highly praised game but I don’t really get it.