GB Feature: Torchlight Review
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Control in the game is very simple. You left click to move your character, interact with objects, and attack, and you right click to use a skill or spell. The game allows you to define some hotkeys for selecting skills, spells, and inventory objects (the function keys and 1-0 keys are all available for this), and there are even some niceties, like being able to press TAB to switch between two skills, and W to switch between sets of weapons. You can also press ALT to highlight items on the ground, and SHIFT to fight without moving. If this paragraph sounds familiar, it should -- Torchlight uses roughly the same control scheme as every other point-and-click action RPG since Diablo II, which makes sense. It's fine to use what everybody else uses if it works and it's convenient, rather than to create something new just to be different.
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.
