Titan Quest

"A Wonderfully excuted game marred by the flaws of its genre"

Comparisons of this game to Diablo and Diablo 2 are inevitable. You just can't escape it and I'm sure the developers knew they were making a Diablo 2-like game. I wouldn't call it a clone, because to call it that would mean calling every FPS game a Doom/Wolfenstein clone. That would be unfair to the developer.

Titan Quest is a beautifully executed game. From beginning to end, you can tell Ironlore put a lot of time and effort into this game. The graphics are beautiful and attention to detail is very respectable. This is one of the reasons why I was disappointed in the game. I was hyped for it and waited for it for nearly a year after discovering its existence only to have it play exactly like nearly every hack and slash game.

Story - 5
There really isn't much of a story. Monsters are attacking towns and you're destined to bring peace to the land. You run into details of Telkines trying to revive a Titan so they can destroy the Gods. Side Quests are sometimes interesting, but generally boring and has been covered by many other H&S games. It's your typical rescue/search item/people quests that have little depth. Some NPC sometimes have interesting things to say, especially about mythology and heroes, but they are rarely part of the game, which makes it disappoint. You hear about Sun Wukung of Journey to the West lore, but never see him. Overall, a disappointment.

Graphics - 10
One of the most beautiful games on the PC and probably the best looking game of its genre. The game has some very nice character/monster designs. The environments are some of the best I've seen. Everything is in 3D, with beautiful trees and grass models/textures. They are lively and sway with the wind unlike Sacred. TQ also has some very good lighting effects that make the game look solid from a graphical stand point. Once you get to ancient China, you really start to appreciate the environments and character models with rag-doll physics. Probably the highlight of the game.

Sound/Music -7.5
Respectable. Nothing really stands out, but it gets the job done. The music isn't anything to write about, but it doesn't annoy you. It blends in with the game well, though sometimes you wish for more innovative tracks. The sound and voice acting are abundant and are pretty nice. The only downside about the voice acting is that they sometimes go on and on.

Gameplay - 6.5
This is the meat of the game and usually the category that makes or breaks a game. TQ is really a good example of how gameplay is more important than graphics by 10 fold. The game looks amazing, but the game-play drags it down. So where do we begin? It's like Diablo 2...you kill monsters and seek out treasure. You then fight the bosses like 10 times more hoping to get some good treasure and you move on to the next time so you can make some progress. That's essentially the point of the game. I rather not get into the details about the skill tree since many people have already covered it. No matter how good or bad it may be, the gameplay of the Hack and Slash genre is getting stale. No, it is stale. Ironlore managed to fix the flaw of having gigantic environments presented in Sacred by making smaller maps, but it still doesn't help much. After you kill the same monster 1000 times, it gets boring quickly.

I was hoping for the game to take the road of Divine Divinity instead of the road of Sacred. Divine Divinity mixed in a lot of good RPG elements and made the game a lot more enjoyable than your typical Hack & Slash game. It gave it depth and kept the player's attention, whereas TQ started to become stale at the 20 hour mark. The only way for the Hack & Slash genre to appeal to games in this time and age is start adding deep RPG elements into it. TQ was a good effort, but it's no longer fresh. Even with the addition of the Immortal Throne, it doesn't make it anymore appealing.

Overall - 7
Good freshman effort from Ironlore, but there is a lot of room for improvement. They're done with Titan Quest now that the expansion is out, I expect them to do a better job next time and stay away from the pure H&S genre. They have the talent and the technical know how...now it's time for them to improve the design of their games. They have the potential to make some great RPGs...and I hope their next game is an RPG, with a deep story and deep characters.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/05/07