Wow what happened to October? Games happened. To many good games to play. Two in particular that grabbed me and took up my time. These two came out towards the end of October. Borderlands and Torchlight. Both of these games share a few things in common with the Diablo games. The only thing in common with Borderlands and Torchlight is that they both have loot. Wonderful abundant loot. But the similarities end there between the two games.

Borderlands is first and foremost a first person shooter. It has a cell shaded style that may turn some off. I think it’s more of a comic book cross hatching style myself. You can see in the screenshots what I’m talking (maybe) about.

Borderlands has a very light rpg mechanic pasted into the shooter. And these guys get it right by keeping the shooter aspects dominate and letting the rpg stuff be secondary. As mentioned Borderlands has loot. Lots and lots of loot. They borrow from Diablo and World of Warcraft so you if you played either of those the loot will look familiar. You got white vendor trash, green, blue, purple and orange items. Each color denotes a higher quality of item.

Borderlands is out now on the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. Be warned despite what the developer of the game may say the pc version is port of the console game. It currently suffers from a number of problems and I suggest the console versions over the pc game.

Torchlight is the direct descendant of the first Diablo game. It follows the first Diablo in every aspect. One town to get quest. A deep deep dungeon to kill monster for items and gold. Just about everything in that first Diablo game you can find here in Torchlight. The game has a number of old Blizzard devs on board that helped make the first Diablo game so the similarities maybe obvious. The music was done by the same guy who did the music for the first Diablo. So it is no surprise that on more than one occasion it reminded me of the music from the First Diablo.

Torchlight has a very cartoony feel that one suspects was influenced by World of Warcraft.

The game does bring a few things from the Fate games (which themselves are inspired by Diablo). The pet for instance is pretty much something retained from Fate. This pet though is handy since you can send your trusty dog (or cat) off to the surface to sell when you fill up your inventory. A few other things worth mentioning is that once you beat the main quest you get the option to retire your character and pass down an item to a new character. When you do this an infinite dungeon opens up as well. So reply value is up there.

The game has three classes. Follows the usual templates with minor variations. You got a big bad warrior, a magic user, and a ranged type of rogue. All of them can specialize in melee and they all get 4 spell slots. And of course a three tiered skill tree to specialize in different buffs and powers.

Torchlight is single player only. Only on the pc. The game sells for twenty bucks. They eventually will put out the games editor so you can make you own levels, monsters, and items (just for a start). This currently is only available online from the games website or third parties like Steam. The devs mention a free to play mmo is on the table next.