Torchlight is a Diablo clone action RPG (made by some of the original Diablo designers) with a cartoon-like style. The game starts in a town where there is a problem in the mines that you need to investigate. This is the main storyline where you journey deeper and deeper to defeat the source of evil, Diablo (just kidding, Diablo would kick the end boss’ butt).

Around town you can find merchants to sell you weapons, scrolls, gems, and perform actions like enchant weapons (which does not always work), and combine gems into better gems (technically pieces of ember) for item bonuses. There is also a wizard who gives you search and find quests and a guy who has random dungeon maps who also wants you to bring back items for him (these random maps are not tied to the main story). The town also contains a chest to store extra items and a shared chest where items can be placed and shared among different game characters.

If you have played Diablo, Torchlight will feel very familiar. You have health and mana points (and health and mana potions), identify and town portal scrolls, and quick slots for spells and abilities. One thing different you have is a pet. Your pet, which you choose and name at the beginning of the game, can learn spells, carry items, and change forms (with different animals you catch while fishing, a little mini game you can play at fishing holes scattered throughout the mines). Your pet can also be sent back to town to sell items, but I preferred to go back to town myself whenever I neeed to unload stuff.

The main quest is 35 levels long. Every 5 levels you fight a boss and find a waypoint back to town, but I really didn’t use these much as you finds tons of town portal scrolls (as well as health and mana potions). There are extra levels you can reach by either talking to the guy in town with treasure scrolls I mentioned earlier, buying map scrolls from the girl who also sells gems, or by killing a phase beast in the mines (which opens a lost portal). These random levels are just for experience and items and are not necessary to finish the game. Once you finish the main quest and return to town, there is a new dungoen in the SE corner of the map. You will find two people in front of it to give you quests (plus the wizard in town who you did quests for during the main story). This dungeon is called Shadow Vault, also referred to as the infinite dungeon because it randomly generates levels forever (for those who just can’t get enough Torchlight).

Some things I figured out while playing the game include making better gems and learning spells. You will find pieces of ember and other items that can be combined by the guy in town who transmutes items. You can only combine two pieces of the same type as far as I know. From worst to least the pieces are cracked ember, dull ember, discolored ember, ember, and cut ember (insert descriptive names in front of ember such as cold, life, etc.). The better ember obviosly gives better bonuses, and you get offensive or defensive bonuses depending on which item you insert the ember into (if you can, items can have 1 or 2 sockets for ember). If you want your ember back later, there is a guy who can destroy your item and retrieve the ember; there is another guy who can destroy the ember to free an item’s socket. For spells, it took me a while to figure out you had to get rid of spells to learn more if you had learned a certain amount already. My pet could learn 2 and I could learn 4 (I played a warrior). You <ctrl>-click the spell to unlearn it (it disappears forever) but then you can drag another spell in its place (a different spell or a better version of the same spell).

After you earn enough experience to gain a level you get 5 points to distribute among your abilities (strength, dexterity, magic, and defense). You also get to learn or improve a skill. Abilities affect how much damage you inflict and can absorb and what items you can use. Levels affect what spells you can learn (higher spells require higher levels), what items you can use, and how high a skill level you can go. You also gain fame as you beat boss monsters and complete quests. When you get enough fame, you get a skill point to apply toward your skills.

My impressions of Torchlight were a fun game for a while, but the middle to the end becomes a grind. After about level 20 you get a better variety of enemies, but it is still a grind. Also, the game is too easy. For most of the game I rarely if ever used health or mana potions. Only until about the last 5 – 10 levels did I really have to watch my health or mana. You receive way too much treasure, most of which you just sell for money. You also get way too many potions and scrolls. I never broke a sweat with the bosses, even the final boss (he just had about a million hit points).

I had fun with Torchlight, but really had no desire to play again as another character or play in the Shadow Vault (I just tried one level). The game really needs a better story, better spells, and a little more challenge. But it is definitely a good start and worth $20 (or $5 if you can get it on sale).

I just finished this game which came out several years ago. I played it on Windows 7 x86 and x64 with no problems. Robin Hood is a pretty good tactical strategy game in real time. You control up to five characters at a time in missions to rescue people, steal gold, and liberate towns.

There are several main characters, some of whom you begin the game with and some of whom you find or rescue as you progress through the game. The game uses clovers as lives; you can collect clovers in missions either on the ground or typically after completing a quest. You can have up to 10 clovers at a time and you can use these to resurrect your main characters at half strength if they are killed.

You also recruit merry men throughout the game. Merry men can accompany you on missions as well as playable characters. There are 3 different merry men: strong, aggressive and mustachioed. The mustachioed (archers) are the most useless of the 3 and you won’t use them for long. Strong men are useful for a while because they can knock out opponents and carry them around (for hiding). They are eventually replaced by Little John. The aggressive men can fight as well, can kill knocked out opponents, and most importantly can heal characters with herbs (they can carry up to 10 herbs at a time).

The game can be interesting (and frustrating) in the beginning as your characters are weak (you can train characters between missions by leaving them in Sherwood Forest  with a trainer; alternatively they can make herbs, nets, meat, arrows, and other items instead) and must sneak around towns and employ tactics such as throwing money bags and bee nests to distract enemies, whistling, throwing stones and nets, etc. Towards the end of the game, though, missions tend to involve Little John (a beefed up strong merry) knocking out enemies left and right while Friar Tuck (or Stutely) ties them up for Little John to deposit them in the nearest building. This makes the last missions more of a grind than anything else.

The game also leads you to believe knocking out and tying up enemies is preferable to killing them by giving you an overall  percentage of kills after each mission. I didn’t see any difference in finishing the game by killing or not killing enemies (my percentage was around 85% non-kills) and having to tow people into buildings takes up a lot of time in the game with no real benefit (other than not alerting other guards or allowing other guards to free soldiers who are tied up, which is another reason possibly to just kill enemies). Finally, in a couple of missions where you have to take over towns and receive help from friendly troops, your “friends” kill enemy troops whenever possible, even those you tied up. With this in mind, what is the point of not killing enemies?

Here are some other tips for playing: with the 3 defensive missions try to send merry men to produce blazons instead of paying or going on the missions (3 merry men equal 1 blazon). By the end of the game you will have more merry men than you need and even have maxed out supplies of items (the most important of which to produce are herbs, arrows, and meat). Try to send Friar Tuck to be a distraction later in the game when you have him as he can heal himself by eating meat (he can carry 6) so he won’t use herbs. It took me a while to figure out how to eat meat but what you do is press the key to select the action; this puts OK on the screen, then click once and wait a few seconds for him to eat the meat. This is the same method you use for Maid Marian’s spying skill (very useful for identifying shaded enemies). After you get Maid Marian take her and the aggressive merry for a lot of healing (she can carry up to 12 herbs). In most battles between Robin and an important enemy (like the Sheriff) Robin can retreat from the battle and get healed if necessary, then rejoin the battle. Furthermore, on the second to last mission where you take York I think, you can send merry men for blazons (you may have been able to do this on the other attack mission but I didn’t try it). By getting about 5 blazons (whatever was the max) before the mission, I actually finished the mission without taking over the whole town because I earned enough blazons before that. Finally, after you collect the $100,000 gold to ransom the king, don’t bother with ambush missions anymore.

The only bug I encountered was when Robin overhears the Prince at the end of one of the last missions tell someone to take a letter saying he will not pay the king’s ransom. Then you are supposed to fight the letter delivery man after the Prince leaves. In my game, the game did not return control of the characters to me after the cut scene and I had to use a cheat code to end the mission. There is also a pretty good walkthrough on gamefaqs.com.

I enjoyed this game for the most part, but by the end I grew a little tired of the grind of knocking out, tying up, and hiding dozens of soldiers each mission. If you are looking for a strategy game that’s little different, give Robin Hood a try.

I finished playing Icewind Dale (IW) and its expansion Heart of Winter recently. IW uses Bioware’s infinity engine like Baldur’s Gate (BG). But IW, while good does not have the story depth or character development of BG. That is not to say that IW is not a good game in its own right.

In IW you create a party of up to 6 characters. You will want at least 3 fighter types but also a couple of healers and wizards, so plan on dual and / or multi-classing. Regular fighters are good because they can be skilled more than 2x in one weapon which gives them many attacks. I also liked having both a cleric and a druid since druids have many offensive spells in addition to healing. Magic users who can summon creatures are very helpful as well.

The story in the main game is okay with some interesting twists here and there and lots of subplots and boss battles along the way; the expansion’s story, while not bad is not great. The action and variety of enemies is nice though. Being in a cold environment you fight many new creatures different from the BG games.  The spells available are also include some different ones from BG; there are many unique weapons as well, but many are available for purchase once you have a lot of money.

While IW had lots of gameplay, Heart of Winter (HoW) was so short that people complained enough for the developers to create an additional area available with the latest patch. The only really annoying thing I can remember from IW was all of the backtracking after finishing an area to leave and the large area of the main village which made you walk quite a bit if you wanted to sell different items (which required seeing different vendors). Starting the expansion, though, was a tedious process. First, if you loaded the expansion with the main game you could access it from a house in the main town in the game. However, once you finished IW the game just ended; the only way to play the expansion is to start a new main game (again) and import your characters until you get to the town where you can access the expansion or start an expansion only game. I don’t understand why this was so difficult; I don’t think the developers thought this through. This sort of thing continues in HoW if you want to explore the new dungeon. There is a halfling you can talk to in the tavern of the starting village who takes you to the new dungeon, but if you finish the expansion first before going with him (like I did) you can’t get back to him unless you start another expansion game since the expansion ends after you beat the final boss.

A goofy thing that happened when I imported my characters into the HoW is that they lost all gem bags, scroll cases, and potion cases as well as anything that was in them. HoW had some other weird aspects such as subplots which one could easily skip if one did not talk to certain characters in the starting village at certain points in the game or go back to the village right before the final area (which is not necessary). I didn’t understand this and thought the developers could have done a better job moving you to where you needed to go to enjoy these subplots.

Overall I think IW is worth playing; I thought it was long and enjoyable with a decent story. HoW is just okay; there are some new tough creatures to fight and you rise a little higher in level, but don’t expect the length or amount of fun that you had in IW. Either way I recommend Dan Simpson’s excellent walkthrough for IW and HoW.

Another oldie but goody, BG2 is the sequel to BG and its expansion (if you played it). If you play through BG2 Shadows of Amn and BG 2’s expansion Throne of Bhaal your party will reach super high levels 20-30+ with some special cool new powers in the expansion. I found BG2:SOA very fun to play. It had a good plot, good development with tons and tons of quests in the beginning of the game and less areas to explore compared to BG. You also could do neat things like obtain your own base (which one depended on your class) and many BG NPCs made appearances (dead or alive, sometimes alive then dead real quick). The battles in BG2:SOA were fun and you really were able to cast a nice variety of spells and found many cool new weapons. The areas to explore were also interesting and you could even join the good or evil side in the beginning of the game depending on how you played your party.

I loaded BG2:TOB with BG2 so I received the nice additions including holding TAB to see all items on the ground.  The expansion also began immediately after I finished BG2:SOA. Another thing loading the expansion adds is the area Watcher’s Keep to BG2:SOA. I think this is best left for after you begin the expansion as it is very tough. I thought, though, that Watcher’s Keep was the best part of TOB. The rest of the expansion, especially from the middle to the end feels like one huge boss battle after another. You have to go through 5 serious boss battles in TOB but the first and fourth are a lot less difficult than the other 3. These 3 tough battles were very long as well taking 15-20 minutes in some cases because of how many enemies you had to fight through. Another cool addition in the expansion is the ability to combine more pieces and weapons into super weapons. You could do a few of these in BG2:SOA, but your demon helper in your pocket plane in TOB can do a great many combinations. Many of these weapons are quite useful to your party as well. In short, if you played BG and enjoyed it, you will like BG2 even more (it even has a real expansion compared to BG).

Finally I want to give a big shout out to Dan Simpson for writing such a great walkthrough  for BG2. I usually refer to Gamespot guides for many games (although I think they make less now than they used to), but the one for BG2:SOA was a joke. I quit using it in the beginning of SOA when you reach the town because the guide didn’t cover probably 90% of the quests available. Sure these quests weren’t required, but how do you expect to get all of the powerful items and experience for your party if you don’t pursue these quests? Anyway, Mr. Simpson’s guide was great and very helpful. I also picked up his guide for IceWind Dale (I figured I’d keep playing these infinity engine games all together). Look for Mr. Simpson’s BG2 FAQ and other FAQs on Gamefaqs.com under DSimpson.

I picked this one up for my kids because it is a console game ported to the PC and it has also been called LOR Battle Front (Pandemic, makers of LORC, also made SW Battle Front 1 & 2, and this game I think uses that engine). They loved Battle Front on the XBox 360 (I played Battle Front 2 on the PC and had fun with it. I’m not finished yet so no review yet). Anyway, this game is similar to Battle Front in that you can change classes at a flag point (although unlike Battle Front, everything is not mostly about capture flag points). LORC has 3 parts – a training mission, the War of the Ring campaign (good guys) and the Rise of Sauron campaign (bad guys). There is also an instant action mode which I didn’t try and a multiplayer mode where you can play together with other people. The training mission deals with Sauron’s original defeat; the game lets you play the 4 different classes (warrior, archer, mage, scout) here and teaches you their different abilities. It also lets you play a hero unit (these units are available in each mission at certain times, usually toward the end of the mission). After the training you have to play the good campaign before the bad campaign is available. There are 8 missions in the good campaign and 7 in the bad one. There are also 3 different difficulty levels: casual (easy), heroic (medium), and legendary (hard). Legendary is not available until you have finished a campaign on heroic (although I found all difficulty levels were available even after I finished the Sauron campaign on casual).

I liked the Sauron campaign better than the Ring campaign, possibly because you did not know exactly what was coming and also because it is fun to be the evil player sometimes. I started the Ring campaign on heroic, but later had to switch to causal because  I grew tired of playing the same mission over and over. That is my first gripe with this game. Each mission is divided into 5 or 6 different submissions, yet the game does not save until the end of the entire mission. I dislike the console checkpoint save system to begin with, but it sucks to get to the last part of a mission and lose and have to start all over again. I play games to have fun, and repetitive play is not fun. I played the entire Sauron campaign on casual and had more fun with it

One annoying thing it took me a while to figure out was how to select a hero character. A message will randomly flash on the screen if you want to play a hero and you have to select yes or no. I first thought you had to use the mouse, but this did not work. I finally figured out you had to use the left arrow key to select yes or the right arrow key to select no. Another gripe about this is that I use the arrow keys to move not the default WASD setup. If you push the up arrow key when the hero message pops up, it will disappear (although it would return sometimes).

Another thing to remember about this game is that it is a third person arcade action game, not a  first person PC game. There are many key combination moves (which I could not always get right) that you need to execute to beat foes. This is also a very short game (which I think is why the makers do things like have checkpoint saves so you replay missions serval times and the game feels longer). I easily beat the game in a few days playing only a few hours a day.

Overall this a good short diversion to get for $20 or less. Just don’t expect a pure PC game here.

Sure these are old games, but what did you expect to see here.

I am going to take these two together since I played one after the other and because Computer Gaming World did reviews of these games in the same issue, although they gave the gold medal to Heavy Gear 2. I liked both games, but definitely feel mech 3 was better.

Mech 2 is still the best Mech game of the series (I have not played Mech 4 yet, but I heard it was different and not as good), but Mech 3 was great in its own right. It had good combat, the ability to repair during the mission (which is nice since you still cannot save in the mission), and good mission briefings which really conveyed a sense of story. Some of the missions were hard, but they were all doable. I only became stuck early on in a mission where you have to defeat an Annihilator. This mech is much better than anything you have at this point. After reading two different sets of hints, I was finally able to beat it and move on. The biggest drawback to Mech 3 is the weak squad commands, the worst being the inability to send one command to all squadmates st the same time. Unfortunately you have to go through each squadmate and tell him or her which target to attack, even if its the same target. This is the one area where HG2 has Mech 3 beat. Still, I found Mech 3 to be a great game even 10 years after it came out, but you’ll need Windows 98 to play it. I tried playing on XP, and the game plays, but you can never beat the first mission because at the end of the mission the game won’t let you destroy whatever you were supposed to.

Heavy Gear 2 is a fun game, but the last third of the game is mostly weak. As I said already the squad commands are great in HG2. You can also choose to take more squadmates in a mission or beef up yourself and fewer squadmates. A gear is more like fighting in Iron Man’s armor (sans flying) rather then piloting a big mech. You can walk or go faster on wheels (it looks like you are skating). There is a huge variety of weapons available from the get go, but you are limited in how much you can carry and improve your gear until you progress through the game. You can also choose to be different gears from light to heavy; unfortunately, your choice is permanent unless you make a different character. I started with a medium model, but was getting my butt kicked so I chose the heavy and did much better. The game is a lot of fun until you get to about mission 15 or 16; from here until the end of the game, with 1 or 2 exceptions, the missions are really hard or hard to finish because you can’t figure out what to do or timed or a combination of the aforementioned. The missions have frustrating aspects such as difficult jumping puzzles, long missions (with no in mission save of course), pointlessly difficult missions, missions with hard to complete objectives, and the last great mission where you complete your task and then have 3 minutes to run out of a station in zero g with tunnels all over the place. How about just ending the game with a cut scene when I do what I need to? If it wasn’t for the last third of the game I really would have enjoyed it more, but try it and make your own call.

NOLF 2 is the sequel to The Operative: No One Loves Forever. I really enjoyed NOLF so I was looking forward to playing NOLF 2. Unfortunately, NOLF 2 was good, but not as good as NOLF. There are some nice improvements like not having to select which gadget to use on something like a lock; the game picks the right gadget for you when you try to “use” the something that requires a gadget. However, it seemed like gadgets were a lot less important in this game; compared to NOLF, I hardly felt like I was using many gadgets at all. There was also no load out screen before each mission (although this would have been impossible since some missions start in the field). You are simply given certain items to use as needed like bugs for phones, etc.

**SPOILER ALERT**

One of the main differences I noticed between the two games was that the second seemed a lot easier. I believe this was a combination of being able to upgrade your character through skills points (which you receive for completing certain tasks and finding intelligence items) and the lack of many stealth missions. At least in NOLF 2 points could be used for something; in the first game, points simply were for scoring your performance.  But once you max out your health and armor, your character is very hard to kill; there was only one point in the game which I found very difficult and was killed (when fighting the mime assassin guy). Other boss battles were easy compared to the first game: fighting Volkov was a joke compared to your fight with him in NOLF, and the 2 or 3 fights against the ninja woman were not very difficult.

As I stated earlier, the second difference was a lack of stealth missions. In NOLF there were many missions where you could not be seen and/or kill anyone; this equated to a lot of sneaking around and could be quite difficult. In NOLF 2, I think there was only one part where you had to sneak into an office; otherwise, you could pretty much go “Rambo” on everyone – setting off alarms just brought some extra guards to fight.

Furthermore, some of the missions felt tacked on and of no particular relevance to to overall story, which was not nearly as good as NOLF’s story. In the beginning of the game, the missions are pretty long and have good pacing with some fun snowmobile driving. Later, you spend time running around India away from police who you cannot hurt; in one part of a mission, you even have to remove wanted posters of yourself for no apparent purpose.  Also, there is the mission where you protect Indians from super soldiers by opening gates or dousing fires with buckets of water; meantime, super soldiers, who you cannot kill yet, are firing at you. Another mission has you running around UNITY HQ shooting mimes and removing bombs, again for no other reason than to give you something to do. And the final mission, where you finally get to fight the super soldiers, was not very difficult at all.

Overall I liked NOLF 2, but it just wasn’t up to the caliber of NOLF. There was only one mystery in the game (what is Project Omega?) and once you solve that, there are no more surprises. This game could easily have been just another shooter with a few gadgets thrown in for kicks. Although there is a part where you have to get out of a trap in 60 seconds, nothing NOLF 2 presents is as cool as falling out of an airplane trying to get a parachute in NOLF. Anyone who liked NOLF will enjoy NOLF 2, just don’t expect a repeat of a great spy game.