PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - March 6, 2010 - 14:38 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Something lurks under this mountain. Something Ancient, and something evil. And it’s your job to figure out what in this blatant clone of Diablo. (Not that this is a bad thing.)
Torchlight starts with your arrival in the mining-town sharing the name of the game. Your reason for arriving is never made clear: Only that a very powerful magic user came before you, and the first entry of his journal the game reads to you talks about some REAL power being here. This power comes at a price that might have been too high, and had he known what it would do to him, he probably would have never even shown up. The mines used to produce precious metals as well as a magical stone called Ember. Used to is the key term, because recently monsters began to pour into the mines from below. Being the good guy you are (or perhaps because you wanted to go down there anyway), it isn’t long before you follow two other adventurers down and begin an adventure that will ultimately pit you against the source of the monsters in an epic battle for the fate of the town, and possibly the world.
When you first start playing, that this game is Diablo 2.0 becomes instantly clear. You will be greeted with a control panel much like Diablo, complete with mana/health gauges and ten slots in which you will place your spells and items, and even start with 4 taken up by health/mana potions and identify/town portal scrolls. In fact the only differences in this panel are that the health/mana are each taking half of one sphere in the center instead of each taking their own on the sides, you do not have a description box for what you are fighting (rather, that is more like Diablo 2 where the game will show that on top as you attack it), and you now have both your left and right mouse button attacks displayed in front of you, as well as an “alt” attack, which by hitting alt, you can swap with your right mouse button on the fly. In short, it takes a lot from Diablo, adds a little of Diablo 2, and improves on both to make for a very adaptive interface to configure and use quickly while in the dungeons. Even the automap returns in almost the same way: you can have it not be there, in the corner like a radar, or in classic overlay, which still remains my personal favorite for these games.
However, not everything is exactly the same. For starters, your belt no longer controls how many slots or what might be waiting as the next item you might choose to use from your 10 slots. Rather, much like World of Warcraft, or many other MMOs, you will choose an item and all of those in your inventory are attached to that button, be it a kind of health/mana potion, a kind of scroll, or even spells/skills you want hot-keyed for quick use. This helps speed up the game to make and make it even better to play.
When you get right down to it though, the ability to place whatever you want in those slots will not be the only thing to remind you of WoW. Graphically, this game shares a lot of the same style and flair as the juggernauted MMO. The 3d rendering and cartoony style will remind you a lot of this, and in a good way. The game has character and charm, and the art will not leave you bored of what you are looking at. On top of this, the game also takes full advantage of this to minimize the power needed to run this game. For giggles, I brought out an old Dell P4 laptop with 1.5 ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, and some old forgotten Intel graphic chipset and installed the game on it. Sure, loading times were long, but the game itself played smooth as butter…. well as smooth as this game runs on anything anyway.
And I do have to bring that up, because this game has one flaw in it’s presentation: The way it loads. Basically, this game takes a “load as it needs” approach to running, which may sound great, until you realize it’s loading all it’s data from a literal zip file in it’s main directory. The results may vary depending on what you run it on and what AV you are using (MSE may not have liked this very much), but anytime anything new showed up, the game would have to pause to load it into memory, disrupting the game for a little bit. Thankfully, these issues are brief and the longer you play that session, the less you run into them, but it is an obvious downside to what otherwise is an absolutely excellent blend of graphical style and performance.
Sound-wise, this game doesn’t fair so badly, either. The music might as well have been ripped right out of the Diablo series…. literally. If you walked into a room with this game idling and the screen turned off, you wouldn’t be able to tell unless you knew before hand the PC it’s on doesn’t have Diablo 1 or 2 installed. Sound effects, are also very pleasing, to boot. Weapons sound about right, all the voices are well acted (and none repeat between enemies… of course few enemies even scream, much less talk, so this isn’t a big issue) and all your major quests include full narration along with the text! That’s right, this clone’s main story is FULLY VOICED. A very nice touch to finish the feel of the game. Course do not expect this kind of detail on any side-quests you take on, but then, a number of those are randomly generated, so to do so would be impossible. (Not to mention some of the later ones that actually are planned have a few bugs, such as a portal that you have to click to the left of to use and voices stop being used altogether… clearly things that are small, but they just did not have time to fix.)
Sadly, I do have one last fault to bring up, though. This game has no multiplayer at all, so if you want to bring a team with you down into the mines of Torchlight, you are just SOL.
Overall, this game is simply amazing, especially for the price. (It launched at $20, and if you can catch it on sale, you can often get it for even less.) If you enjoy Diablo style games, you are doing yourself a disservice to miss this game. This is the game type refined, and it would have scored even higher had it included online gameplay.
Featured Articles, News, PS3, Xbox 360, past - by Jeff - February 23, 2010 - 12:49 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Capcom gives us some more looks at Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley. Full Story
Featured Articles, News, PS3, Xbox 360, past - by Jeff - February 15, 2010 - 15:43 UTC - Be first to Comment!
EA’s Skate 3 is not looking so bad. Full Story
Featured Articles, News, PS3, Xbox 360, past - by Jeff - February 11, 2010 - 13:26 UTC - Be first to Comment!
This game just keeps looking better and better… Full Story
Featured Articles, News, PC, PS3, Xbox 360, past - by Jeff - February 10, 2010 - 19:26 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Red Dead goes pre-order bonus crazy! Full Story
DS, Featured Articles, News, Nintendo Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, past - by Jeff - February 10, 2010 - 16:57 UTC - 3 Comments
A new “Moves” Video
Full Story
PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - February 6, 2010 - 15:09 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Often when a developer releases a game, they want the first thing you say when you start playing to be simple “wow.” They want you to be wowed with the scope, with the music, with the graphics… they just want your first impression to be “wow.” The problem is that you have MANY developers looking to one-up each other at this. So what’s “wow” today is likely going to be “normal” or “meh” the next day. However, in Mass Effect, I think we have a title here that will remain “wow” for a long time.
Mass Effect follows the adventures of Commander Shepard, who through the events within the game, becomes the single most important person in the galaxy and the struggle for the survival of all intelligent life within it. Right off the bat, you will find out Shepard has been nominated to be the galaxy’s first human specter (in case you do not know, specters are agents who do the dirty work for galactic civilization as a whole, but do so outside the law), and your first mission in the game is a test to see if he has what it takes. This also quickly becomes the perfect vehicle to introduce the main antagonist of the game that you will spend the rest of the main missions chasing after.
And missions are exactly how to describe this game. You will travel to various locations and complete missions recorded in your journal by people and things you see/hear/talk to as you see fit and completing the main ones whenever you want to move the core story along. While the game is exceedingly short for an RPG, (my little brother completed the Xbox 360 version of this game in roughly 8 hours), the game offers an insane amount of events going on throughout the galaxy both triggering more of these missions and triggered by your actions during and between them, giving you the impression of a full and busy galaxy. This is why this game continues to be one with a “wow” effect. Add to this the codex entries you will receive explaining the deep, rich, and very complete history and current events of the galaxy, and you will see one of the most complete worlds made for any video game to date. Bioware REALLY made a masterpiece in the worlds you get to play with.
And play you will. The game mechanics are for the most part exceedingly smooth, from conversation to combat, feeling almost completely natural in it’s new home on a keyboard and mouse. I say almost due to the fact that holding down spacebar to open a combat menu mid-combat is not as natural as it could have been. (Just hitting space would have been better.) This is really trivial, however, since the game pauses while you do this, allowing you to breath and think about what you are doing and making even a small amount of awkwardness forgivable.
However, also worth pointing out is an issue with the cover system: you can get stuck on walls, much like the complaints I have heard personally about Gears of War (regardless of version). Overall, it works rather nicely, but but concidering I can speak from experience where the very last boss of the game almost killed me because I got too close to debris I was backing up around and got stuck on it, I would say it is shy of perfect and could probably have used a little bit of work.
Technically, I wish I could be as impressed with this game as I am with the world and overall gameplay. Make no mistake, this game is a port from the 360, and it shows. EVERY issue I had on a technical level seems to stem from this, and settles into exactly 3 issues:
The first, most common, and most trivial issue is graphical pop-in. Almost every time when you first get into a level, you notice the details of the area are VERY low… and the high detail pops in a second later. This is a direct result of the game being a port from the 360. On the console, the idea was to reduce loading times since the game had to load from a disc, letting you get going while the game finished loading. The problem here is, we are on a PC. We are not loading from a CD or DVD. We are loading from a much faster hard drive. It would have been no issue to wait an additional half-second and see everything the instant the game starts the map, not a moment later.
The second issue is not quite as common, but a little more of an annoyance…. awkward loading. This seems to come from bringing the RAM limitations of the 360 home, without whatever extra code the 360 had to handle this in the background (I honestly suspect relying on the 3 cores of the 360 CPU was a big part of this, where PCs at the time were still balancing around a single core processor). The results are that randomly the game will drop frame-rate while your hard drive clicks away to load a new chunk of data, sometimes pausing entirely with a “Loading” screen. This was completely unnecessary on the PC, though, just due to the RAM available to the PC gamer. (PC required a Gig of RAM and no card with less then 128 MB of RAM on it’s own, more then doubling the what the 360 has.) They could have easily taken advantage of that, and with a little work, adjusted the on the fly loading to not be so obtrusive. Still, this never annoys for more then a few seconds, and NEVER happened in the heat of the action, so this is a forgivable, if annoying oversight in the porting process.
The third oversight is with sound. Simply put, this game uses accelerated sound by default…. and it sounds nice… in theory. However, it seemed to me it was set for 5.1 surround sound only, which means anyone using this with stereo speakers (like most PC gamers that Im aware of) literally can not hear the speech or sound effects almost at all over the background noises without turning this feature off. First lesson of game developement is to make sure your game runs right in the most common configuration, making this a blatant failure in the process.
Further pressing matters are bugs in the non-accelerated version of the sound. I can not speak for these being in the accelerated or not since I could not use it, but the code running the software version is terrible. If too much is going on that it has to keep track of, it starts to loose sources and stutter the background music/effect. The results are dropped conversations, gunshots, footsteps, and even in two of the bars in the game, the dance music getting stuck repeating the first few notes like a broken MP3. Needless to say, this is VERY annoying, and leaves you thankful that it seems to only be an issue in 3 very specific areas in the game, one of which it goes away as you kill the army of enemies. Keep in mind, this was NOT a slowdown, as the game at all 3 points didn’t drop a frame from the FPS… this was purely a sound issue.
Overall, though, this game is incredible. You are given a huge galaxy with an insane amount of detail which still reacts to your choices very well. The main game is short, but as a plus, this also means there are very few missions you actually must do, leaving you to be free to do pretty much anything you want, or not do anything you don’t want. The choice is yours, which seems to be the core idea Bioware was going for when they made this one. VERY well done!
past - by Leigh - February 5, 2010 - 16:23 UTC - 1 Comment
More titles than you could ever imagine have been added this week. Full Story
DS, Featured Articles, News, PC, past - by Jeff - January 27, 2010 - 13:20 UTC - Be first to Comment!
For release March 5 2010 in EMEA Full Story
Featured Articles, News, Nintendo Wii, past - by Jeff - January 25, 2010 - 13:36 UTC - 1 Comment
Available in North America this April. Full Story
PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - January 23, 2010 - 03:01 UTC - Be first to Comment!
“Do you know where you are? Do you have any regrets? Are you ready?” These three questions are all the warning you get from this game about the horrific things you will witness once you leave the first room. Sit down, get comfy, and be ready for your skin to crawl….
The White Chamber is a point and click horror adventure, in which you play the part of an unnamed young woman, who literally just woke up in a coffin in a dark room. She has no idea how she got there, and you do not even know her name. After a short puzzle about the only other thing in the room, you begin your adventure to figure out where you are, what happened, and how you can get away from a nightmare taking inspirations from both Silent Hill and Event Horizon. This rather simple story-line is very well executed with plenty to do along the way, making for a very enjoyable game, if not one you will find relatively easy and exceedingly short to complete. (I think I did it in under 2 hours.)
When you first look at this game, one word will scream at you: anime. The game looks nice at a native 1024×728, but the main character and the world she inhabits have a blatant anime-feel to them. Do not let this fool you. It will only lull you into a false sense of security until you see your first WTF moment, which will likely make you jump out of your seat, proving the game to have looks that suit it’s needs and atmosphere quite nicely.
The sound effects and music only amplify this. For most of the game, the music is non-existent, leaving you to the ambiance of the computers and machines around you, piping up only when it can drive the tension through the roof, literally baiting you into the next step like an 8 year old meeting a dare. And just as often as not, you will find good reason to dread the conclusion it draws you to.
Control-wise, it is rather simple, however. You left click somewhere to move there, and right click things to use/see them (the game will open a small menu with the two icons when you do this). You also have an inventory which will appear when you move the mouse to the top of the screen, but leave it off the screen until, making for a rather minimal interface that works to enhance the eerie-ness of this title. However, like FPS, there is really little a game of this kind can do to innovate controls on the PC.
Overall, this is one creepy game. It will make you nervous. It will make you uncomfortable, and it will keep you coming back till you see the conclusion. If you are a fan of horror titles that actually ARE scary, pick this up…. Do not hesitate. Open a new browser and follow a link below: Studio Trophis made this game as free-ware, so you have nothing to lose trying this out.
Downloads:
Studio Trophis’ site: Latest version (1.7 as I write this) is here, but hosted by FileFront
FilePlanet: Version 1.3, for those who would rather use Fileplanet over FileFront.
