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glenatronSo after seeing it mentioned in a few places ( starting with Penny Arcade, which is one of the few sources on games that I genuinely trust ) I downloaded myself a copy of Torchlight last night.
It really is a lot of fun - anyone who enjoyed Diablo or the Playstation Baldurs Gate games will really enjoy themselves with this. I quite like my storytelling games but this one has managed to make the plot-light ( "there's monsters in the mine!" ) and monster-heavy mechanic really good fun, with a colourful cartoonish aesthetic that reflects Warcraft a bit but also reminds me of The Chaos Engine a little. Either way it takes the best things from a bunch of games of this type and throws them together with a whole lot of fun, a pet who you can transmute by feeding them fish and a fishing sub-game to give some more reflective moments amongst the hacking, slashing and zapping.
Instead of designing for the latest and most up-to-date graphics cards they've gone for making things a bit cartoonish and having it light enough that you can run it on a netbook, which I really like as an approach. It looks pretty lovely on my PC, mind.
This really is what independent games writing should be about, a bunch of people making something relatively simple but really entertaining for people to enjoy.
Now, back to those mines...
It really is a lot of fun - anyone who enjoyed Diablo or the Playstation Baldurs Gate games will really enjoy themselves with this. I quite like my storytelling games but this one has managed to make the plot-light ( "there's monsters in the mine!" ) and monster-heavy mechanic really good fun, with a colourful cartoonish aesthetic that reflects Warcraft a bit but also reminds me of The Chaos Engine a little. Either way it takes the best things from a bunch of games of this type and throws them together with a whole lot of fun, a pet who you can transmute by feeding them fish and a fishing sub-game to give some more reflective moments amongst the hacking, slashing and zapping.
Instead of designing for the latest and most up-to-date graphics cards they've gone for making things a bit cartoonish and having it light enough that you can run it on a netbook, which I really like as an approach. It looks pretty lovely on my PC, mind.
This really is what independent games writing should be about, a bunch of people making something relatively simple but really entertaining for people to enjoy.
Now, back to those mines...