Torchlight XBLA Review: All The Loot, Half The Noise

First things first, we throw a couple of startle traps by the doorway to treat a few conform to damage. Then we serve up a fill up of skeletons to keep the feverishness off of me. we dash in, use my Hamstring skill to break enemies, unleash a few bursting arrows for throng control, swallow a illness potion, throw away a few needles in to the closest organisation of baddies and, finally, dash back out. What monsters sojourn are left to possibly be electrocuted or drain to death.

As cold as all that sounds, the many extraordinary segment is that we did it all without a set of keys and mouse.

Four skills may be mapped to not similar buttons and triggers, whilst a second set of 4 skills may be accessed by attack down on the D-pad. With 8 skills existing at any since moment, it's easy to be ready for a accumulation of situations. Personal Computer players may be used to more existing hotkeys, but they of course aren't necessary. After a few minutes, we was hurling traps, cast of characters debuffs and summoning minions with ease.

For the that longed for the Personal Computer version, the happiness of Torchlight resides in the (admittedly familiar) regulation of face to face with dungeons, gangland slaying monsters and at regular intervals returning to locale to sell surplus rob and batch up on supplies. It doesn't reinvent the genre, but rsther than refines it, sanding away the coarse edges for a smoother experience.

For example, all Torchlight characters take a pet, be it a dog, cat or the XBLA-exclusive Chakawary, that sits someplace between newborn fire breathing monster and hulk lizard. In add-on to helping players in combat, pets can moreover be installed down with products and sent back to locale to sell them, leaving players giveaway to keep slaughtering monsters. After a notation or two, the house pet will return, its fill up right away packed with uninformed gold. Players can even give their pets protecting apparatus or learn them spells.

In short, Torchlight for Xbox Live Arcade retains all of the magnetism of the Personal Computer original. Unfortunately, it moreover retains the Personal Computer version's leading flaw: a full insufficient of multiplayer, an mainly critical underline in the action RPG genre. Even the elementary skill to traffic things with other players would have been a really acquire addition. As it stands, multiplayer will have to wait for for Torchlight 2 .

Even without multiplayer, however, Torchlight on XBLA is as shut as you can obtain to cave crawling obscurity for $15. Like its Personal Computer counterpart, it removes the cruft of the genre, permitting players to obtain right down to the loot-driven core with a minimum of fuss. And now, interjection to the streamlined controls, we obtain it all without the constant clacking of a mouse.