Halls of Torment is Diablo cranked up to 50,000 kills/hour

The old-school Diablo games endure for a lot of reasons. Some players like the deep lore and world-building. Some like partnering with friends and working through dungeons as a team. Some like hunting for incredibly rare loot and maybe selling it on a livestream.

Sometimes, though, you dive into high-level Diablo just for a chance to kill a screen full of monsters really quickly.

If that kind of high-density enemy killing is what you're looking for, Halls of Torment's recent Version 1.0 release is a near-perfect take on the concept. Despite the decidedly old-school presentation, the game takes very modern inspiration from Vampire Survivors and its quick-hit bursts of leveling up through overwhelming enemy hordes. In doing so, it has become my absolute favorite way to wipe out enemies at rates approaching and exceeding 50,000/hour, at some points.

Survivors of the fittest

If you've played Vampire Survivors you'll be intimately familiar with the basic gameplay loop in Halls of Torment. You start as just a smol bean with a weak weapon and slowly pick at a trickle of grunts that march toward you from the edges of the screen. Each defeated enemy drops gems that contribute to a leveling system for better stats and more efficient killing, which is crucial because the enemy hordes quickly increase in both density and relentlessness.

Eventually, the grunts get joined by bosses that absorb more attacks and lob tougher-to-dodge projectiles. Taking these down lets you customize your builds with new attack options ranging from auras of protection to semi-autonomous ghostly fighters to giant mace balls that swing in huge circles.

By the end of each timed, 30-minute dungeon-crawling session, the screen is utterly filled with all sorts of fantasy trope beasts, rushing your position and (hopefully) falling to the epilepsy-inducing flurry of powerful abilities you've built up over time. They also make some god-awful racket as they pass—the din of overlapping skeleton bone-rattles has been haunting my dreams after Halls of Torment sessions.

Your first Halls of Torment run starts with a basic warrior, but new classes quickly unlock, each with their own distinct weapons and gameplay rhythms. My favorite ended up being the exterminator class, which uses a flamethrower to simply turn everything around him into a wall of flame. If that's not your speed, you can choose from defensive shieldbearers with extremely slow attacks, melee axe-wielders that swing quickly with wild abandon, ranged archers that can deal damage from afar, magic-users that make heavy use of area-of-effect spells, a class with a semi-autonomous dog that goes after nearby enemies, and more.

Diablo, but also not Diablo

Just from glancing at Halls of Torment screenshots, it's easy to glean the heavy visual influence the game owes to the grainy, isometric sprites of old-school Diablo. That throwback, nostalgic appeal extends to little touches like the menu system and low-fi voiceovers for NPCs as well, which comes across as a deliberate if cheesy design choice.

The game's old-school sprites also make it easier for your graphics card to handle literally hundreds of moving objects and flashy attack effects on screen at once, too. Despite this, my relatively high-end system started struggling to maintain a consistent frame rate by the end of the more difficult dungeons.

The visual frenzy of all these old-school sprites can get a bit overwhelming, especially when some of your own summon attacks end up difficult to distinguish at a glance from enemy threats. Overall, though, the use of distinct colors makes it easy enough to quickly evaluate a screen full of information and extrapolate what it will look like over the coming seconds. I especially appreciated the big, purple lines and circles that telegraph where projectile attacks are going to appear just moments before they do.

Looks aside, the sheer density of enemies means Halls of Torment sometimes feels less like Diablo and more like playing an old-school bullet-hell shooter. It becomes a game of exploiting small gaps in the enemy lines to stay safe, carefully managing your relative position to manage the movements of the (relatively dumb) enemy groups. There's a subtle push and pull inherent in staying close enough to do maximum damage (and collect the crucial gem drops) while keeping enough distance so the hordes collapse your exit route and quickly overwhelm you.

Unlike Vampire Survivors, which automatically focuses most attacks on the nearest enemy, Halls of Torment offers you the ability to actually aim your attacks with either the right analog stick or the mouse. That might sound like a small difference, but it makes a large impact when you're trying to carve your way through a seemingly impassable wall of enemies or trying to protect a flank that's threatening to close up as you run in the opposite direction. You can also toggle auto-aim and fire options, though, if you're looking for a one-handed play option.

Halls of Torment also leans heavily on an inherent character regeneration stat, which lets most characters recover health over time, sometimes rather quickly. This makes the game rather forgiving of small mistakes—if you need to squeeze past a grunt, the damage they do can be fully erased with a minute or so of careful play.

Number goes up

My biggest complaint with Halls of Torment so far is the overwhelmingly similar feeling of all six of the game's main dungeon areas—they mostly stick to tired tropes like "the fire pit" and "the frozen tundra." Cosmetics aside, most of the areas feel like the same big, open space with occasional walls or other barriers to get in your way. The one exception is a long bridge with two dueling armies that encroach from either side, which mixed things up just enough to be interesting.