If Diablo 2 were set in the Roman times…

Titan Quest is exactly what you would get. In the recent plethora of Rome based titles, Rome: Total War, Glory of the Roman Empire, and the up and coming CivCity Rome, it seemed all too natural for a Diablo 2 clone based in Roman times to come out. Titan Quest is an addicting game, but the nostalgic addiction that has kept Diablo 2 running for so dissipates too prematurely leaving the gamer with another program to uninstall.

Exactly like Diablo 2

For those who haven’t played Diablo 2, I apologize that you might not get this comparison, but it is painfully the first thing I thought of and many others have thought of. Titan Quest essentially takes the overhead click and kill gameplay straight from Diablo 2. Fighting enemies essentially involves clicking on one, hotkeying skills if necessary and then clicking on the next target in mind-numbing glory.

The potion system is exactly the same. If you need a dose of health in portentous times simply hit R. A mana boost is easily gotten by hitting E. The combination of this with the skill usage and enemy-targeting is all that there is to it.

As I joked about in a partly serious way from my Diablo 2 review, Titan Quest is likely to give one carpal tunnel. The heavy repetitive use of the mouse movements and clicking left my wrists aching. Given the lack of good Diablo 2 drought since the game was last released, I was initially engrossed with the game, so much so that I played it nearly six hours straight. I started late at night and to my disgust when I looked up out at the window I saw the early crack of dawn and let out and string of curses. Few games in the market have managed to hold my attention long and this is one of them.

Still the novelty ultimately wears off. The fun of Diablo 2 is partly that it is like playing slots for a super rare item to enhance your character with. In Titan Quest, enemies drop entire sets of weapons and armor, meaning there are a ton of items on the battlefield after every slaughter. Thankfully they have provided a filter. By pressing Alt you can single out all the uncommon (yellow), rare (green) and set items (blue). Rares and set items are extremely hard to find and usually drop every 30 min to an hour of battling but their stats are usually so good that they become the new default. Unfortunately because the item drop is so high, most of the uncommon items are rather bad and a lot of the game goes into selling off the junk.

Money unfortunately as it was in Diablo 2 very quickly becomes useless as merchants do not sell any weapons or armor that is even remotely comparable to the stuff dropped by enemies.

Another con to the item system is that while the inventory eventually does get fairly large and allow you to carry a substantial sized assortment of loot, the game does not organize the placing of items when you pick things up. If you’re holding onto a fairly large amount of loot and want to bring it back to the shop and you suddenly come across a nice looking item, you may need to rearrange your inventory quite a bit to make things fit.

This item arrangement problem is a bit compounded by the fact that the potions in this game are part of the inventory and come in batches of 5. They can easily clutter up the inventory. To go along with the potions are the runes you pick up, which can be combined (similar to making gems in Diablo 2) and then used on items to enhance them. These runes are amazing as they can enhance even rare and set item drops, which can really allow you to make powerful items even more powerful. However, as soon as they are added the item if permanently changed and only one rune can be added per item. The other problem is that they also clutter up the inventory, and given that there is no chest to store items in Titan Quest as there was in Diablo 2, this can be a bit of a hassle.

Still to counter the lousy inventory management, Titan Quest gives you free town portaling, meaning you can leave the battle field whenever you feel like it to go back to the town and sell things. This keeps makes it easy to sell off your inventory whenever you need to, preventing one from having to inventory manage so much. Still the load time while porting in between places is a bit of a drag and took 5-7 seconds even on my Pentium Duo Core 3.0 Ghz and 7600 GT.

The Beautiful World of Titan Quest

Titan Quest is thankfully one gorgeous game, but is lacking in a few places. It is fully 3d and so you can zoom in on the explosive action (mainly from auras and elemental attacks) similar to the Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance games.

My complaint though is that like most overhead games, the graphics get reused to no end. There are usually only 4-5 types of enemies per act, and they simply come in slightly different armor and weapon configurations but other than that are merely different shades of color. I do not believe that a game developer is so hard pressed to make a few more enemy models. Also the enemy variety is a bit of a drag. I got tired rather quickly of fighting the same old crows, satyrs and boars. They might as well have ripped the enemies from Diablo 2.

Another gripe I have in part is that there are only two character models to choose from, the default female and the default male. In Diablo 2 the way you selected from your base character appearance was dependent on class. In Titan Quest because the class system is based on generic character models, the look of your model is entirely based on the armor, which in my opinion kind of sucks. Some customization of the build, size, and so on that has become characteristic of RPGs these days would have been greatly welcomed.

In the end, the environments while lush and pretty and the lack of load time keep Titan Quest a fairly good game. Occasionally the game will hiccup when going from one area to another and lag a bit, but this is forgivable as it happens infrequently.

The game environments are gigantic and at times a bit too large for my tastes. Traveling from one town to the next can be easily a 2 hour journey especially if you decide to check out every cave along the way.

Speaking of caves too, there are far too many in this game and they all look unfortunately the same. While a few palaces and dungeons exist, I actually wished they had spent more time creating a few more elaborate indoor environments.

The Amazing Skill Tree

The best part of Titan Quest I will say that keeps it slightly separate from other overhead clones is the skill tree. As you level up you add points to any of three attributes, Intel, Str or Dex. You also gain skill points which you can allocate initially to one class, but when you arrive at a certain level, you can dual class. Because of the multiple classes, combinations of classes create certain character types. For example, my main character was a Rogue and Warrior which made him an Assassin. I do not remember all the character types but as you can probably figure out this leaves a fair amount of different character types to play through if one feels motivated to. In addition, if you happen to pick up the ultimate item but it is for the wrong character type, its possible to reallocate your skill points in exchange for gold. This allows you to modify your character accordingly if you feel like playing him/her differently or if you’re just tired of the same old bash combos and want to try something different.

The flexibility of the skill system keeps the game rather fresh and allows the player to go through a variety of different playing styles before settling on what they like best.

Music / Ambience / Crunch noises

I have to say the music and sound effects are up to par. The sound of bones falling to the ground after you’ve bashed a skeleton are very important to redundant overhead games and Titan Quest executes this perfectly.

In addition the ambient music while barely audible under the dominant SFX adds a nice Roman classical tone to the game. All in all, perfectly done.

Closing Remarks

After playing the game once through, I can say Titan Quest is rather addicting and provides a very solid 20 hour play time. However, part of this long time is artificial as the game simply is just mind-bogglingly huge. A few side-quests exist for each act, but none of them go any more in depth than the simple “there is a monster, go kill it” or alternatively, “there is a monster that has kidnapped my sister, go kill it and rescue her”. The overall storyline is barely worth mentioning as I eventually lost all patience to read it. There is little to no character development as typical of these games and Titan Quest unfortunately follows suit.

Despite the little gripes I have made though I can’t complain too much, if you’ve been tired of waiting for Diablo 3, this is probably the best remedy I’ve seen so far. It has the addictive “must get best item set” type of gameplay and is only marred by the fact that it does get repetitive all too quickly.

Unlike Diablo 2 I do not think I’ll go through Titan Quest again, because unlike Diablo 2 it does lack a certain difficulty to it. The bosses are a bit too easy and the hordes of enemies that surround you remind me far too much of Diablo 2 to make me feel like I should commit 70 hours to leveling up that amazing character.

Titan Quest is worth the purchase but partly only if you need your Diablo 2 fix. After the novelty wears off, one wishes it had been a bit more innovative.

*Note

I did not talk about multiplayer because I did not bother to try it. Apparently you can play quests using your single player character with other players (which sounds rather nice) but is probably not too different again from Diablo 2.