Torchlight is an action role-playing game developed by Runic Games and published by Perfect World, released for Windows in October 2009. The fantasy-themed game is set in the fictional town of Torchlight and the expansive caverns and dungeons nearby, which adventurers explore to collect valuable loot and battle hordes of monsters. Following the October 2009 digital distribution release, a Windows retail box version was released in the U.S. in January 2010 by Encore, Inc, and JoWood Entertainment published a retail box in Europe in April 2010. A port for Mac OS X was developed by World Domination Industries and released through Steam on May 12, 2010. Runic Games and World Domination Industries developed a port for Xbox Live Arcade which was released on March 9, 2011.

Development of the game was led by Travis Baldree, designer of Fate, joined by Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer (co-designers of Diablo and Diablo II), and the team that worked with Baldree on the original incarnation of Mythos. Runic Games has announced a sequel Torchlight II, planned for release on PC in 2012.

The player controls a lone hero who explores a series of randomized dungeons, fighting large numbers of enemies and collecting equipment, gold, and other loot. The game also features a single town which serves as a hub, to which the player character can periodically return to buy and sell items to NPC vendors and obtain quests. As the protagonist delves into the dungeon, a series of quests are presented which involve battling unique bosses that advance the main storyline. Optionally, the player may take on side quests, random quests or visit branching dungeon areas. The graphics are three dimensional and viewed from an overhead perspective, similar to the isometric perspective used in the original Diablo. On personal computers, the game is controlled using a point-and-click mouse interface and keyboard hotkeys, while the Xbox Live Arcade version uses a controller and has a completely redesigned user interface. The game generates each level of the dungeon by assembling modular “chunks” of the game environment. Each chunk is designed by hand and may be composed of multiple rooms. They can contain scripted events and interactive objects such as levers that open secret doors or cause bridges to move. This approach to level generation is intended to create dungeons with more purposeful design, instead of environments that simply look like “crossword puzzles that have been extruded upwards.” As in Fate, the player has a permanent pet which fights alongside and can carry and sell loot. The initial pet can be a wolf dog, a lynx or, in the retail version of the game, a ferret; the player can feed fish to their pet to transform it into different creatures. Also present in the game is a retirement system, in which the player can pass on an heirloom item from an old character to a newly-created one, likened to a New Game Plus game mode.

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Reviews of this game

• 5/10 Did not met my expectations by michael (2012-09-14 11:27:10)

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Game submitted: 2012-09-14 10:23:54