Wasted Seconds Wasting your precious time since 2009.

Demo Impression for Torchlight

I initially completely ignored this game because, well, I’m on a netbook most of the time. And these things are notorious for not being very game friendly. That and I’m kind of a purist. I still play the original Diablo to this day (on rare occasions). And I even go so far as to fire up Rogue from time to time, mainly because I love me some dungeon crawlers. Then I read somewhere that there’s a netbook mode for the game, so I hopped on Steam and grabbed the demo.

Now the performance for the netbook mode in Torchlight for my little Intel GMA 950 powered system is pretty pathetic … frame rates in the single digits when there’s a lot going on on screen, but nothing that keeps it from really being playable so far considering you’re mostly just clicking around on things on the screen and using keyboard shortcuts.

But what really surprised me is just how MUCH the demo has … I think my character is on level 5 or 6 and I’ve been playing the game for around two hours. I was expecting to maybe hit up one level of the dungeon and that was it. But the demo is almost it’s own game in itself. I’ve gone on a few quests so far even. It’s really quite surprising.

Now, of course, I’m playing this on a netbook, so it’s not really fair for me to comment on the graphics too much because all of the details are down and it’s at a paultry 600x400 resolution. and I have noticed some problems at that resolution like most text being near impossible to read and some text just not fitting period. But this isn’t the way the game is meant to really be played anyway. Sometime soon I’m going to fire it up on the desktop upstairs that has more than enough power to handle this game.

But the gameplay itself … it’s made by the guys who did the original Diablo games, and this really shows it. And it takes a lot of the really annoying things from Diablo and just fixes them (constantly clicking and pixel hunting for example). I haven’t gotten all THAT far into it, but this is still one hell of a demo. I’m definitely picking this up the first chance I get. It brings me back to those old days of playing Diablo for the first time and just going through and tearing through these enemies.

I’m really curious as to what they ADDED to this game. I’m not reading any reviews of it until I get to play the full version a good chunk to kind of keep my view of it fresh. And it looks like it actually has a story, something Diablo was very thin on. But yeah, if you liked Diablo back in the day or if you like dungeon crawlers in general, definitely give this a try.

Possibly related posts:

1. Demo Impression of RIP 3
2. PC Demo Impression of Gridrunner++
3. Diablo is not an RPG
4. My two cents about the Left 4 Dead 2 demo.
5. Bayonetta Demo Early Access