Titan Quest: Immortal Throne Review
Played on:
Windows
Pentium M 2GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM
GeForce Go 7800GTX
Minimum:
1.8GHz CPU
512MB RAM
GF3 or Radeon 8500
Recommended:
3GHz CPU
1GB RAM
GeForce 6800 or
Radeon X800 Video
It's been years and years since Blizzard's Diablo 2 was released, and it's still going strong. Its addictive brand of simplistic gameplay, deep character building and huge number of items really kept gamers coming back. Since D2's launch in the summer of 2000, there have been quite a few PC-based attempts to recreate that simple, yet fun gameplay style and very few have succeeded. The closest was last year's Titan Quest, the Greek-themed game in the style of Blizzard's instant classic - it recreated a lot of the things that makes this kind of game so infectious. Now, Iron Lore's unleashed an expansion pack for Titan Quest called Immortal Throne.
Immortal Throne adds tons of new items, several additional convenience-related features, a new Skill Mastery, and a fourth chapter of gameplay that takes places as your character crosses the river Styx and into the underworld of Hades. Your descent into Hades isn't going to be just a walk down some steps, though, as you'll have to fight your way through hordes of monsters first to get together the items required to open a portal.
One of the first things you might notice with Immortal Throne is that you now have a personal bank and a shared one. The personal one can be expanded twice for increasing sums of gold, and it winds up adding a sizable amount of space for your character. But your total capacity is even greater once you realize that you can create new characters and run them to the first village - then you can just drop items into the shared bank, switch characters, then pull them out of the shared slots on your new "mule" characters. These kind of features were added with external third-party utilities in the original Titan Quest, but now it's all done in game.
The new skill set included is called Dream Mastery, and it allows you to gain control over time, summon a new pet, and deal damage to your opponents. It's a very well-rounded mastery and combines with the other eight quite nicely. Beyond that, there's also a new item slot for something called an Artifact. You'll have to build these things out of a recipe, completed relics or other items, and a ton of gold, but they add tons of great abilities - they act like a super piece of jewelry. The guy you can build these at also has another feature which will be nice for those who are constantly changing loot: you can now break items away from relics you had put in them. There are two downsides to this in that it costs a lot of money, and you only get to keep either the relic or the item the relic went into. The other one is broken permanently in the process.
Let's get into what is going on after the end of Chapter 3 and the start of 4. You find out quickly that your journey's not over and you'll have to work on taking down more enemies and titans. Yeah, the story is pretty much the least-important thing here, but I was a little disappointed in the environments once you get to the river Styx. The whole place is a desolate wasteland with demons and other evil things trying to take you down, and overall I found it much less interesting than the Egyptian and Asian environments in the original game's second and third chapters. The boss fights are definitely just as good though, and you'll really need to bring your A game to beat some of them without dying repeatedly.
Immortal Throne adds a wealth of new items and item types, like expensive scrolls that are one-time-use items that can seriously debuff your enemies or buff yourself, or even weapons that impart new spells and skills upon usage, or jewelry that improve the power of your pets. They all work in the original game's chapters once you have Immortal Throne installed, and have been retroactively added from low levels up through Chapter 4. The scrolls are a big one, because they're almost necessary for beating some of the new bosses in the Epic and Legendary difficulties.
One thing I want to note is that you can't just make a new character at level 30 or 40 and jump right into the expansion pack's new chapter. If you don't have your original Titan Quest save games and characters (which are saved buried in your My Documents folder), then you'll have to make a new one and go back through the original game's chapters before you can see what the expansion's new levels have to offer. But for those who played a ton of Titan Quest and made it into Epic and finally Legendary difficulties, there's plenty of new loot and new challenges. If you didn't get far into the original game, Immortal Throne probably won't do much for you, but if you played the hell out of this game last year, then this expansion pack is a no-brainer.
I do want to mention that the same insecure online play is still here in Immortal Throne; the lack of online servers or accounts means that your internet games with other people can be easily full of items that aren't remotely legitimate. If you want to make sure that every item that players have is legit, then the only way to do that is to only join games with your friends. PvP is still not officially included as well.
Still, Immortal Throne builds on all the good things about Titan Quest. With hundreds of great new items, some simple but effective new features, and a dozen hours or more of gameplay (which multiplies with the new difficulty levels), any fan of the game will likely find this to be a worthy addition. It might be a little frustrating if you don't have your old characters to jump right into the new expansion levels with, and the new areas are a little dull, but the boss fights are just as good as ever and the new items make it worth going through. As RPG expansions go, this one ranks up there with some of the best in the last several years.
