Syp at Bio Break did a post today declaring Torchlight to be a carbon copy of Fate, and he has a list of bullet points to prove it. And looking at his list, I can’t disagree with a single point. In some cases I’m taking Syp’s word on the fact that the points match up, because I never got far enough in Fate to see how later parts of the game, like passing items on to other characters, worked.
Why? Because I found Fate tedious. A not-very-good Diablo clone with a vile copy protection scheme. It came pre-installed on one of my HP machines which allowed you to play a few sessions for free and then asked you to pay for the game. It never occurred to me to pay for it because I didn’t find the game the least bit compelling.
And yet my early hours with Torchlight have me enthralled. In fact I hesitated about writing this post because writing it is eating into my Torchlight time.
To really explain why I love Torchlight while I found Fate pretty ‘meh’ I’d have to re-install Fate, and that isn’t going to happen, so I’ll just have to look at the intangibles of Torchlight and make some guesses. And mostly I think it’s because the combat, simple as it is, feels so satisfying. Each attack lands with a solid impact. Each urn breaks with a satisfying crash. When dozens of creatures swarm out of a tunnel or a mine shaft it just sends a thrill up my spine… “To battle!!!”
Fate just felt like ‘click click click’ whereas Torchlight feels like ‘Slash! Bash! Pow!’ … even though the mechanics and bullet points match up so well. Torchlight has a soul. Fate was just a game. I guess you can’t capture ‘soul’ in a bullet point.
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And while we’re talking Torchlight, GameInformer has a post up on how to rebind the keys. It isn’t as easy as it should be, but it ain’t rocket science either.
