“Torchlight” – The Final Chapters!

Finally, we have made it to the final segments of 2009’s Torchlight by Runic Games.

The second-to-last chapter features a bit of side-questing, followed by a journey through the Black Palace in order to find Master Alric and bring him to justice. The enemies in this last area are hard, but in the battle against Alric I make the mistake of “upgrading” my armor, which given some sort of odd stat distribution ends up gimping my primary skill (the explosive shot) and makes the fight about ten times harder than it needs to be.

Alric, however, doesn’t let us deliver the death blow, and instead proceeds deeper into the dungeon in order to sacrifice himself to give Ordrac a physical body!

In the exciting conclusion to this series, we battle Oldrac in a prolonged fight that requires quite a few deaths to understand and then some trickery involving environmental scenery. Oldrac has the unfortunate ability to summon tons of dragon minions to his aid that, if not killed very quickly, will be used as fodder by him to restore a significant portion of his health.

My strategy was to lead him away from the large room and into the small area near the entrance and then whittle his health down slowly. Dying in this area would respawn me right near him so that I could immediately continue the fight, and the small quarters kept him from being able to summon an unmanageable amount of minions. The downside is you are much more open to attack in this fashion, but if you use the stalagmites to your advantage, you can strafe him and keep him opposite you while using area-of-effect skills to take him out.

The ending is fairly underwhelming, and I am not sure I am going to attempt the challenge dungeon, but nonetheless, despite the disappointing conclusion (there’s no real “ending” cinematic), I did greatly enjoy this playthrough!

I hope you all had fun, and please subscribe to see more upcoming fun!

Jessica Brown

Retro Games and Technology Editor. She'll beat pretty much every Mega Man game without breaking a sweat.