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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...
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no subject
Date: 2 Nov 2009 18:34 (UTC)Oki, now that's out of the way.
So can you just run about aimlessly killing things? I like that. My ex always used to get really pissed off with me when I played Diablo and Guild Wars because that's all I'd do, and apparantly that's not playing the game properly.
Unfortunetly I'm not sure my PC is up to it ... it runs Guild Wars, but I think I used up all my computery goodness to install it (I'm not a techie. I only have a vague idea about gigabites and megabites and RAM and video drives and shit like that).
But it looks awesome.
And you say it's for fans of Diablo and Baldur's Gate so it must be good.
Eeeeee. :3
no subject
Date: 3 Nov 2009 11:17 (UTC)And yes, as far as I can tell, running about killing everything is the plot. A bunch of people who worked on it were on the original Diablo team so there is certainly common ground there, it would be a great thing to tide you over until Diablo 3 arrived.
Also your pet can be a dog or a cat, but the cat is basically a lynx. Just saying...
no subject
Date: 7 Nov 2009 01:05 (UTC)I'll take that as a sign.
no subject
Date: 7 Nov 2009 23:30 (UTC)Get your fellow to purchase it then you can try it. Of course, if you're not seeing enough of him to start with this may not help...