A good starting point for this hack and slash.
The game really looks dated now, but since it is now close to 4 years old, I can get over it. The sound is nice. When you hit someone or cast a spell, everything sounds nice.
The gameplay is a classic hack&slash. You need a mouse strong enough to hold many clicks! There is plenty of loot through the game. However, at a certain point for me, around level 25 out of 100, I just did not get anything better than the equipment/weapons that I already had. I know that there was still a way to go, but still...
You choose a companion at the beginning of the game. You have a choice between a cat, a dog or a furret. You have a choice of 3 characters only. I would prefer to have a little more variety. It feels about 10 years late on this aspect. While playing, you can send your companion in town to sell your loot so that you can continue to play without having to leave the action. That is a nice feature.
The story is absolutely missing. You are in a city where there are monsters below and you got to kill them. End. That is as simple as that. I expected a little more than that. So, what you do is that you go down 1 floor by 1 floor, until you reach the boss. Once completed, you can go in a crypt where you still go 1 floor by 1 floor and kill monsters. These levels are randomly generated though, so there is a little variety in each of these floors. However there is no additional type of monsters. You have all seen them previously in the game.
Globally, Torchlight is not a bad game, however I would expect a little more because of all the good things that I have heard from it. Still, I will play Torchlight 2 very soon, so I enjoyed it in some way. Let's see if they fixed some of my concerns.