Torchlight works really well on the Mac. The performance is good, it looks great and is indistinguishable from the PC version, and it’s as fun as ever to play!

When I say the performance is good I mean that it’s not quite on par with the version I’ve been playing on my Vista Bootcamp partition. It’s not far off, but I did experience a few slowdowns during boss battles that I never had running it on Windows. My guess is that old graphic card drivers are to blame, but that can be remedied in the future if Apple takes Steam and gaming on the Mac more seriously and decides to update those drivers. Additional tweaking of the OpenGL port by the developers of Torchlight may also improve performance in future patches.

Apart from the slightly weaker performance, there is one other problem I’ve experienced with playing Torchlight on my Mac; if the framerate drops, keyboard input lags behind what happens on the screen, resulting in a sudden flurry of actions that are performed too late and out of sync with what you want to do. This happened to me in boss battles particularly; I needed to quickly drink a health potion, a mana potion and then perform a special attack in rapid succession, but ended up taking a few extra hits before the actions were performed. I am aware that some actions have cooldowns and can sometimes hinder you from performing other actions while they are cast, but this is not the case here. I’ve been playing the game for 30+ hours on my Vista installation and have never experienced this even when the framerate occasionally dropped.

Other than that the experience has been exceptional, and it surpassed my expectations for the initial launch of the Mac version. It feels made for the Mac, not ported to it, and it gives me confidence in future releases for the Mac on the Steam platform. Kudos to Runic Games (the developers of Torchlight) for pulling this off so well!

Torchlight is hands-down the best action RPG released since Diablo 2. So if you like these kind of games, you owe it to yourself to give Torchlight a try. You can buy it or try it at both torchlightgame.com and steam. Happy clickin’!