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[IMG News]

GameBanshee has posted a new review of Runic Games' Torchlight. The action RPG gives players the chance to choose a character and venture from the safety of the town of Torchlight into randomly generated dungeon levels.

From the review:

Of course, Torchlight does have some unique features. Your pet, for example, adds inventory space for you, and it can wear jewelry and learn spells (most of the spells in the game are found rather than appearing in a skill tree). Torchlight also has a clever system for enchanting equipment. For a modest fee, an enchanter will add a random bonus to an object for you, but each enchantment also comes with a chance of total disenchantment, and this chance grows with the number of enchantmentss you add. For most items, it's pretty safe to enchant them four or five times, but after that the item gets useful, and the chance for a disenchantment grows to about 10%, and you have to decide how risk averse you are.

The main dungeon that comes with Torchlight consists of 35 levels, and you get a new theme after every five levels (so the undead levels look different than the goblin levels, for example). The enemies in the main dungeon are fixed, with Ordrak always being level 30, but there are optional levels you can visit, including (I think) an infinitely large shadow vault that opens up after you've defeated Ordrak once. That means you can keep playing your character for about as long as you'd like, and it also means you can adjust the game's difficulty on the fly. If the monsters in the main dungeon are too tough for you, then you can hit some optional levels for a while and build up your strength.

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[Hobeaux]

i rather enjoyed this game--in fact, I signed up for Steam just to get it. Like all things it does have its share of things that I could quibble about, for instance the unusual leveling tree that i didn't quite grok right away; that there are just too many drops with similar values and it isn't always clear which is a better choice (also, removing an item that boosts your ability can actually cause other items to suddenly drop off you because they were dependent on those abilities), and so on. but these are quibbles--the game is a lot of fun to play, running around and bashing things and getting very satisfying explosions.

i did get annoyed that the game came out in retail months after it came out on Steam. I would rather have purchased the Retail version instead and not deal with the Steam DRM and annoying updates (if you don't have an internet connection you can't play your games, and if an update just refuses to download and install you can't play)

[Eric5h5]

Hobeaux, on 07 January 2011 - 10:02 AM, said:

I would rather have purchased the Retail version instead and not deal with the Steam DRM and annoying updates (if you don't have an internet connection you can't play your games, and if an update just refuses to download and install you can't play)

You can just start in offline mode.  I'd still rather have non-Steam versions just because they start faster and you don't have to click through dialogs, so I got it from macgamestore.com.

--Eric

[dokter_mac]

Eric5h5, on 07 January 2011 - 10:45 AM, said:

You can just start in offline mode.  I'd still rather have non-Steam versions just because they start faster and you don't have to click through dialogs, so I got it from macgamestore.com.

--Eric

I agree with Eric but I want to add something.

Offline mode does not work for all games, too bad...
Launchtime is indeed faster for most of the 'non-steam games'. But performance stays the same... (when a game runs in offline/online mode)

The Steam code that one have to add if you wanna sell it via Steam is small. But it still can result in a crash from your game when you try to run it without Steam installed or when you try to run it in offline mode. This sucks and I think it needs to be solved!
Also they can't force us to stay 24/24 online...

Never the less I still think Steam is a good thing for Mac games. So personal, for various reasons, I would buy the Steam version from a game.
It's like the Mac App Store for games always up to date, etc...

I'm sure that we will see more and more 'programs' like Steam or the new App Store, which are in a way only personalized browsers, in the future!
With more I mean the current better Mac game sites (where you can buy and download a game) like macgamestore.com...
It's so much cheaper and one will sell much more products...

Sincerely.