TorchLight game

I have a Steam account, but I mostly have Steam not running...for other reasons, I had it on last week, and up popped one of their infomercial windows (a key reason why I don't run it), and the top thing was "TorchLight", and there was a free demo.

Steam is actually pretty slick overall, although it didn't start out that way. Now it's excellent.

Anyway.

I played the TorchLight demo...this is basically Diablo 2.5, or Diablo 2 with Warcraft graphics. So I bought the full game.

Pretty Nice. Many identical names for things, there's a good merchant system, each one has a brand-new load of stuff for sale when you return to town (a la Dungeon Siege). There are Town Portal Scrolls, Identify Scrolls, a nearly infinite qty of merch items with lots of recombination and predefined things (although their definition of "unique" is slightly different from mine...at one point I actually *did* have 2 of the same "unique" item). There are some health-recovery gems, you can fuse them for higher value, and pop them off to reuse.

There's a near infinite amount of play possible, because one of the things you can do is buy a scroll that will open a portal to another map--one not connect with anything else in the story--and it will be instanced to about your current performance level. Or you can buy them and hold them for a while, until they become easy walk-throughs.

The monster at the tail end is REALLY difficult. I think I got killed like 6 times while working him over. A key thing to have learned before going in there is how to summon a lot of helpers (Skel 6 seems best), and the Level 30 spell for seismic shock, which has this interesting advantage of being usable multiple times with no wait in-between (although you will run out of mana). It can take down a lot of opponents at once. [my son also played TL, and did the mage character and boosted his various summon skills to the point where he had a squad of 15 or so summoned things, meaning he didn't have to actually get close to directly fighting anything]

I think the idea of needing "Identify Scrolls" is stupid/pointless..

You have a sidekick/pet, which can help fight, but won't be as good as the skels, and is best used as pack mule...with one added bonus: when the pet is full up, you can send it to town to sell everything it is carrying, and it will come back with the cash. That's what I'm talkin' about!

The various map levels will reload with opposition creatures, if they don't have some special relationship to the main story line. This allows you to redo a level for more points or goodies.

I did have a couple of problems, one task just isn't completing for me...I think I did it, but it still registers as not done, which means I can't move on with the supplier of it (who probably has other tasks).

Apparently levels dynamically generate, so they should be different for a game restart...didn't look like that was true, though. Diablo 2 did do this--if you started over, levels were fairly different, other than some set locations that were quest-specific, but you could redo the entirety of all of them.

I thought the game was too short. I played the entire thing in just over a weekend. You can play as one of 3 character types, so I probably should go do one of the others...and it turns out that you can give a bunch af items to your other selves via the "shared items chest" which is a huge deal in your favor, if you actually know this. Too bad you can't give $. Still, it does argue in favor of keeping a variety of items on hand to pass on, covering a range of levels.