Played on:
Windows
Pentium M 2GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM
GF Go 7800 GTX Video
Windows XP
Every six months to a year or so, some game is released that no one's heard of yet winds up being much better than anyone might have thought. From Far Cry to Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, from Mercenaries to No One Lives Forever, it's always a pleasant surprise jumping into a game that's instantly addictive, engaging throughout, and holds up over time. Titan Quest from THQ and Iron Lore might not wind up in the same league as these games, but it's still a great game that few people saw coming.
If you read the box for Titan Quest, you'll learn that it's the brainchild of Age of Empires co-creator Brian Sullivan and his new development team Iron Lore. They've set out to create an action-RPG title in the vein of Diablo II but with more, more, more. With amazing full-3D graphics, lush environments, ragdoll physics, and sharp animations, they've definitely got the visuals down - but does it have that intangible addictive quality that makes all of Blizzard's games so fun to play over and over?
The one-sentence description of Titan Quest goes a little like this: "real" Greek Mythology meets Diablo II (although the game branches out into Egyptian and Asian mythology as well). Sure, the graphics are way beyond Blizzard's classic action-heavy RPG title, but many of the simple, addictive elements that made D2 so infectiously brilliant have been reproduced here. From the portal system, to the three difficulty levels, to the ALT-key holding to see the dropped items, to the different types of loot to be had, you'll see a lot of similarities. But to start, it seems pretty unique: character creation requires you to make only one real choice: male or female. After a couple of easy quests where you simply have to beat on some low-level demons, you'll achieve level 2 and will get to choose one of eight masteries. This is like your character class, but you will also get to pick another mastery at level 8. Your choices are: Warfare, Defense, Nature magic, Earth magic, Storm magic, Hunting, Rogue, and Spirit magic. You'll find that some combinations of masteries will be more difficult to get working effectively, especially if the stat requirements for the two you pick conflict with each other.
Making Progress
Progression in Titan Quest involves lots of clicking to kill monsters. Sure, you can put any attacks you want on either mouse button or on your number keys, but too much finesse early on is wasted: just keep smashing things to have the most fun. Later on you'll have to mix up certain spells or abilities to really do some damage, but in this respect Titan Quest is very accessible early on. And monsters always drop whatever items they're carrying - if a Satyr has some beat up, old axe, then when he dies he will drop it for you to pick up. You might not want it, though, because many items are of a "broken" quality which makes them worth almost nothing at the store, but it's also really cool to see an enemy using a really nice weapon and knowing that when you kill him, that weapon's yours for sure.
When it comes to spells and abilities, Iron Lore has taken some liberties with the Diablo / World of Warcraft formula of a skill or talent tree. Sure, you've still got a tree of different skills you pick from, where some work as prerequisites for others, but you'll get many more skill points in this game. And you'll also have to "unlock" new tiers in your masteries by dumping points in to a separate bar to get to the next level. The points you put in to unlock these new skills don't feel wasted like you might think, though, because they give you bonuses to your stats as well. And you'll also be able to directly increase your five main stats - Health, Energy (just like mana in other games), Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence - as you level up, but you can increase them through your skill tree as well.
The ability to choose a second mastery creates the opportunity for thousands of unique character builds in Titan Quest, and you can even buy back points you've spent in skills that you can't stand. The cost gets massively expensive if you keep doing it, but at least you can fix minor mistakes without blowing too much gold.
Great Graphics, Ugly Bugs
From a technical standpoint, TQ is both wonderful and frustrating at the same time. The full-3D engine is pretty demanding and requires a very powerful system to run at full detail and high resolution, and going down from High detail to Medium sadly takes away a whole lot of the game's visual splendor. But if you can run it on high, you'll see some great shader effects for spells and other battle elements. One of the best things in this game is doing a massive fight in a field with several players and pets versus a dozen monsters, where the grasses sway realistically as you keep fighting and blowing up enemies. Combine this with some hilarious over-the-top ragdoll physics, and explosions just become that much more fun. There is also no loading-time transitions from one area to another, and going indoors causes a cool transparency effect where you can see your chracter through the roof of whatever you're going into until you totally transition indoors. Of course, there is a somewhat-rare crash bug related to these transitions which can sometimes kill off the coolness of that effect.
High detail is tough to achieve on a mid-range computer in many cases, as there aren't too many tweaking options overall here to fine tweak detail versus performance. Then there are the bugs. Titan Quest shipped to stores with a bug that can corrupt your character's save file, and while this bug's not terribly common, it's unacceptable. I've found solutions on a couple of forums that can fix the corruption, but you can't expect gamers to figure this out. A patch is confirmed to be on the way which will fix the save game corruption, but this is the kind of bug that either needed to be fixed before release, either in a super-early patch or just out of the box.
The sounds in Titan Quest are very satisfying, and most of the sound effects are all new; I haven't heard any that are obviously borrowed from "stock" effects libraries. The music will come and go, helping to immerse the player into the game's atmosphere a little bit more. Major boss battles will bring up some appropriate music, but even then it's overall little more than functional. There are plenty of NPCs you'll be able to talk to as well, many of whom aren't vital to the story. This voice acting ranges from decent all the way down to abysmal, but it's more of the former than the latter in my opinion. Still, the hours of dialog included can be completely skipped if you want with hardly any impact on the game's fun.
