Titan Quest Review

Diablo 2 has alot to answer for.  Not only has it swallowed many peoples lives with it's addictive nature, it has also spawned many Diablo 2 "clones".  Titan Quest is one of these clones.  Unfortunately, it seems not only to emulate the good parts of Blizzard's classic, it also brings back the bad parts.

One of the main problems with Diablo 2 was the repetition of the gameplay.  Point, click, repeat until the game is finished.  Titan Quest suffers the same fate, as you point and click your way through the entire game with only the occasional different approach, however, for fans of the formula this can been seen as a good thing.

The game gives you a good sense of freedom with your characters development, starting you off literally as a nothing.  You begin the game outside the small village of Helos armed with nought but a small knife and a tunic, however after you've slain a few beasties and get your character to level 2, the game really opens up to you.  After your first level up, your given the choice of selecting which "mastery" you want your character to specialise in.  There are 8 masteries all together, ranging from simple warrior classes, to mage classes secialising in Lightning, Fire or Nature.  It's once you choose a mastery you see how the game can really be open to some good old charcter personalisation, letting you choose to sink skill points either into a skill, or the mastery itself, increasing base statistics along with it.

Once you have the hang of the masteries, which can seem complicated to Action RPG newcomers, you can start having more fun with the game, using spells and buffs till your hearts content, offering a very brief reprieve from the monotonous pointing and clicking mentioned earlier.

Once you're used to the game, and you start levelling up faster, you will get to select a second mastery at level 8, giving you yet more freedom for a totally custom character.  This customisation is one of the key elements of Titan Quest's replay factor.  If the game hooks you within the first hour or so, there's a high chance you'll be replaying it again and again with different classes and equipment.  Playing the game as a warrior with a really big club is a decidedly different experience from playing through as a pet owning class, where you summon a pet or two and hang back, casting buffing spells on your underlings from a relatively safe distance.  Going through the main areas of the game; Greece, Egypt and China are distinctly different when using a different class from your first play through.

The graphics of Titan Quest are still doing a good job even today, 2 years on from the original release.  The lighting effects as day switches to night, and your various buffs that cause faint green glows against the darkness is really impressive sometimes.  This can be a problem though, Iron Lore seem to have stopped patching the game now, and it hasn't yet been fully optimised, and can stil bring a half decent machine to it's knees on higher settings and resolutions.  Fans are doing a good job at keeping the game alive though, creating new patches for the game aswell as aditional content.  This is another area where Titan Quest excells.

The game shipped with a map editor and fully featured set of creation tools, allowing players to write their own enemy scripts and sequences, potentially allowing them to create whole games of similair quality to the real thing.  People have taken advantage of this, and with user made mods such as XmaX, it really adds to the longevity of the game.  The tools are, I will admit, a bit too much for me, as I couldn't get into using them at all, but they are definately capable of making some genuinely good mods and levels, the user created content can back this up.

Taking the game online, either on the main game or a user created map is simple, and well worth it.  Playing Titan Quest online is a great experience for like minded players who just want to meet up and kill some monsters.  The simple interface allows you to select a character to take online, choose a game, join and then your off, with minimal lag from personal experience.  Any items and experience earned online carries back over to your single player campaign, so your also not losing anything you gain online.

One of the only obvious downsides to this game, is the sound.  The voice acting is atrocious and makes the fairly generic tale of man vs God (or in this case, Titan) even more bland.  The music can pull up the atmosphere sometimes with the strong orchestral scores that really fit the mood, however, it's not enough to save it from the poor voice acting. 

Overall, this is one strictly for the fans of Diablo 2.  If you didn't like Diablo 2's gameplay, you will not like this, however, if you did enjoy it, you'll likely enjoy going through this game over and over, trying to complete that set of epic armour, or trying to find that spear that once belonged to Achilles.  If your a fan of the genre, this is a safe choice for something to pass many hours for you, and you'll hapilly click away till your hearts content.