Every so often a game comes along that does almost nothing new, but gets everything else right. Titan Quest is not quite that game, but it’s darned close.

Think Diablo meets Clash of the Titans, or if you don’t remember that 1981 Ray Harryhausen gem, Diablo meets Troy with monsters and magic. It seems the brutish Titans papa Zeus locked away a millennium or two ago are a-knockin’, and it’s up to you to hack your way through a cool million or two disenfranchised zerglings to save the world. Over a 40 hour spread, you’ll cruise through segmented renditions of Greece, China, and Egypt, and probably cart at least a couple thousand items back and forth through portals for cash on your path to hero-dom. Maybe they should’ve called it Mule Quest.

Here We Go Hero, Here We Go

Nothing wrong with four-legged beasts of burden, of course. At least not when they come tricked out with magical wardrobes and a bazillion single or dual-wield weapons. You start with a basic male or female character, pick a tunic color (where’s “sheer”?) and bang, you’re up and running. Well sort of fast walking, anyway. You start in a quaint little coastal village where someone in so many words says: “Help! Monsters!” and points the way, to which you’ll roundly oblige by left-clicking your way into throngs of satyrs pillaging and burning and, you know, doing whatever else rowdy goat-things do.

Combat’s as easy as left-clicking, though you have to click repeatedly to keep swinging just hold the button down over an enemy. If you’re even a little off, however, you’ll move instead of attacking, inviting the monster to move in response and botching your aim. In short, there needs to be an automatic repeat-attack option, or even an outline around creatures to let you know when you’re “on.” The alternative is to just click-click-click repeatedly. Yes, we’re all old hands at that by now, but it’s worth pointing out Titan Quest finally roasted my left mouse button.

Shortly after clearing out the first few farmsteads and wilderness areas, you’ll level—when you do, you’ll get to pick from a list of “mastery” areas broken into subsets that focus on philosophies like offensive or defensive combat, fire- or storm-based magic, etc. Within each are dozens of skills with individual ranks that add buffs, mostly of the “damage dealt” variety and which you assign to the right-mouse button for quick battle access. As you level, you’ll receive points to bump your core stats and skills, and once you hit level eight, you pick up a second class of your choice, allowing for all sorts of hybrid or focused melee/magic combinations.

Grind Me Up

If you’re waiting for me to tell you Titan Quest does anything particularly unique, well, go read that part at the beginning about Diablo again. On the other hand, Diablo 2 looks absolutely butt-ugly compared to Titan Quest, which yields some of the best looking top-down 3D vistas to date. Multi-source soft-shadows, high-dynamic range lighting (or bloom effects that look just as good), foliage that rustles as you stride through it—we’re not talking Pixar quality or anything, but definitely a step up from Dungeon Siege 2. That said, you’d best have a beastly rig to run with bells and whistles on full or when the screen plugs up with enemies.

For all its pretty looks, you rather stupidly can’t pan the camera. While terrain goes transparent automatically, chances are good you’ll be wishing they’d given you the option to at least to rotate the view, though you can zoom down to an impractical shoulder-level angle. And what a cruddy choice of fonts for the menus and display windows. It’s not unreadable, but the attempt to make it look antiquarian (or whatever) does make scanning numbers a little harder than necessary. Other rookie nits include a mini-map that won’t let you click to send yourself on a long walk, inventory items that don’t auto-organize well, and effects icons for active spells that offer no sense of time duration.

Otherwise this is basically a polished game of connect the dots, where the dots equal cities and outposts between each area’s start and end points. Walk into a city and you can talk to a few citizens for thematic filler, but if you’re like me, you’ll probably get tired of hearing weak attempts to bridge mythological elements with quests that amount to “free my daughter,” “kill boss X,” and “recover my pitchfork of hay-poking.” I wasn’t even reading the quest descriptions anymore by the halfway mark.

And the monsters, while nifty-looking, can get a little run-of-the-mill, with occasional appearances by double or triple sized behemoths. Fighting satyrs for a bit is fine, but for three-quarters of the fifteen-hour long Greek area? Again, if you’re that guy who likes to scour maps shrouded by fog of war just to make the “black stuff” go away, Titan Quest is probably your bag. It’s almost like stepping on sidewalk cracks—you can’t help it, and it’s somehow bizarrely albeit meaninglessly pleasurable. And if that’s not enough, take your character online and you can jam with up to five additional players. The twist? You can start a solo game, turn it into a multiplayer game, then keep playing it as a solo game.

Until Diablo 3…

Can something be entirely derivative and almost great? Why not! Titan Quest does for action-RPGs what Serious Sam did for shooters and offers something enjoyable to mouse-poke-poke-poke until Blizzard gets off its collective derriere and dishes up a proper sequel.

Article By: Matt Peckham
Video Produced By: Michael Leffler