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Title: Titan Quest
Genre: hack-and-shash RPG
Developer: Ironlore
E.S.E.R.B Rating: Teen
Overview:
Titan Quest is a mimicry of Diablo II, wherein the player travels across the ancient lands of Greece, Egypt, and China battleing mythical monsters.
The Box:
As an obsessive video game collector, the packaging is almost as important to me as the game. I got the "Gold Edition" of Titan Quest. It comes with both the original game and the "Immortal Throne" expansion pack on the same disc, the quite-decent soundtrack on another disk, two manuals (one for the original game and one for the expansion. Both are quite informative.), and a concept art booklet.
Review:
Titan Quest is part of a growing PC game genre which I like to call "If only I could be Diablo..." games. If you have played Diablo II, there really is not much cause to play Titan Quest--you have already experienced a nearly-identicle yet superior game.
You start out choosing your gender, name, and the color of your tunic. Then you are unceramoniously dumped into the ancient Greek countryside, where some investigation on your part quickly reveals a village that is being harassed by Satyrs and killer boars.
At this point, history and mythology geeks may be eager to jump into this world of ancient lore. If you are one of those, however, be prepared for disapointment. Even on the first page of the manual, in some flavor text, I found this error:
Because it's not like Prometheus, who created the humans and gave them fire, was a Titan. Right?
Now you may think I'm just nitpicking here, but this kind of thing goes on throughout the entire storyline. What makes this sort of thing really bad is that the writers clearly knew what they were talking about, refering to obscure myths and famous Greek citizens. However, they simply don't seem to care about creating anything authentic.
There are health and energy potions, for Athena's sake! And the Great Wall of China seems to have been displaced by a few hundred years.
A role-playing game set in a world of ancient Greek mythology is an intruiging concept. Unfortunately, the writers of Titan Quest seem to have just not given a shit about the concept.
As the story progresses, you find that the Titans are breaking free from their prisons (very slowly.) This is what is causing the world's animals to go mad, the dead to rise and attack the living, and monsters of all sorts to begin roaming the wilderness.
Evil deities returning from their cosmic prisons? Demons roaming the land? A few heroes going around killing those demons and taking their stuff? This sounds awfully familiar.
That's because it is. The plot is basically that of Diablo II, but with an ancient-world setting tacked on.
The gameplay follows suit. As you kill monsters, you get loot and experience points. You use the experience points to pick out special abilities from a skill tree. You then use these new skills and new loot to kill yet more, tougher monsters. There have been a lot of Diablo II rip-offs this past decade, but none have more precisely ripped it off than Titan Quest has.
I won't go too much into gameplay details; I plan to review Diablo II soon, so I can just tell you about that instead. It would be more worthwhile to list the ways in which Titan Quest's gameplay is NOT identical to Diablo II's:
-You do not pick a character class from the very beginning. Instead, you pick one when your character reaches level 2.
-When you reach level 8, you get the option to dual-class.
-When you die, you are reborn at the last "Rebirth Fountain" you touched. These are scatterd periodically throughout the world. Also, you do not loose any gold when you die.
-The world is not randomly-genrerated, and players are often forced along linear paths through canyons.
Through your quest, you will go through three acts, each of which take place in different regions of the ancient world. Again, just like Diablo II, though in that game there were four acts. Unlike Diablo II, however, the acts are pretty much the same except for appearances. Egypt is just like Greece except with sand and tougher monsters. China is just like Egypt but with Buddha statues and tougher monsters. The expansion pack adds a fourth act to the game, set in the Underworld, and this offers a bit more variety. Still, it ultimately feels like more of the same.
This game is long. Very, very long. It will take most players several days to get throuh Act I their first time through. Unfortunately, what makes it long is repetition: you go through miles of wilderness battleing thousands of monsters, over and over. This sounds fun, but gets old very fast. It doesn't help that, both in single-player and multi-player moddes, all the monsters respawn every time you quit the game and load it up again. Yes, even the "unique" boss enemies. If you decide to take a break from the game before getting all the way through one of the massive areas, you start back as much as a mile away from your destination as where you left off, and have to fight all those same monsters over again.
The graphics, on the other hand, are quite nice. Titan Quest is, without a doubt, the most visually appealing isometic game I have ever seen. You'll encounter lovely water effects, pleasant-looking fields of grain swaying gently in the breeze (then getting trampled as a pack of centaurs charges up it to kill you), birds flittering through the air, and impressive vistas. If you are a graphics hound, you may be able to squeeze at least a bit of satisfaction from this.
Now, on to the multiplayer! Titan Quest has a free online matchmaking service much like Diablo II. A single game can have up to about a dozen players adventuring cooperatively or fighting each other. Due to the size of the enviroments, however, it can be difficult for players to actually find each in the world other once they join a game.
Mutliplayer mode opens up a new realm of strategy. The different classes and secondary classes all come into play to create a dynamic team effort. There's some real synergy in the way the classes are designed to work together to launch coordinated assaults on the enemies.
Actually getting those assaults coordinated can be a hassle, though, since the chat system has limied functionality. Players can talk to all other players in the same game. You can't talk to people while you are still looking for a game, you can't talk to people who are in a different game, and you can't choose to speak only to players in your party.
All in all, Titan Quest simply has no identity of its own. It desperately wants to be Diablo II, and fails to do anything beyond merely mimicing its inspiration. I can't recomend Titan Quest to anyone, because the kind of people who will like it are going to like Diablo II a lot more.
My Rating: 3 stars out of 5.
***
Title: Titan Quest
Genre: hack-and-shash RPG
Developer: Ironlore
E.S.E.R.B Rating: Teen
Overview:
Titan Quest is a mimicry of Diablo II, wherein the player travels across the ancient lands of Greece, Egypt, and China battleing mythical monsters.
The Box:
As an obsessive video game collector, the packaging is almost as important to me as the game. I got the "Gold Edition" of Titan Quest. It comes with both the original game and the "Immortal Throne" expansion pack on the same disc, the quite-decent soundtrack on another disk, two manuals (one for the original game and one for the expansion. Both are quite informative.), and a concept art booklet.
Review:
Titan Quest is part of a growing PC game genre which I like to call "If only I could be Diablo..." games. If you have played Diablo II, there really is not much cause to play Titan Quest--you have already experienced a nearly-identicle yet superior game.
You start out choosing your gender, name, and the color of your tunic. Then you are unceramoniously dumped into the ancient Greek countryside, where some investigation on your part quickly reveals a village that is being harassed by Satyrs and killer boars.
At this point, history and mythology geeks may be eager to jump into this world of ancient lore. If you are one of those, however, be prepared for disapointment. Even on the first page of the manual, in some flavor text, I found this error:
That's right, folks. Humans existed way back when the Gods overthrew the Titans. And they sided with the Gods in the first war.
Because it's not like Prometheus, who created the humans and gave them fire, was a Titan. Right?
Now you may think I'm just nitpicking here, but this kind of thing goes on throughout the entire storyline. What makes this sort of thing really bad is that the writers clearly knew what they were talking about, refering to obscure myths and famous Greek citizens. However, they simply don't seem to care about creating anything authentic.
There are health and energy potions, for Athena's sake! And the Great Wall of China seems to have been displaced by a few hundred years.
A role-playing game set in a world of ancient Greek mythology is an intruiging concept. Unfortunately, the writers of Titan Quest seem to have just not given a shit about the concept.
As the story progresses, you find that the Titans are breaking free from their prisons (very slowly.) This is what is causing the world's animals to go mad, the dead to rise and attack the living, and monsters of all sorts to begin roaming the wilderness.
Evil deities returning from their cosmic prisons? Demons roaming the land? A few heroes going around killing those demons and taking their stuff? This sounds awfully familiar.
That's because it is. The plot is basically that of Diablo II, but with an ancient-world setting tacked on.
The gameplay follows suit. As you kill monsters, you get loot and experience points. You use the experience points to pick out special abilities from a skill tree. You then use these new skills and new loot to kill yet more, tougher monsters. There have been a lot of Diablo II rip-offs this past decade, but none have more precisely ripped it off than Titan Quest has.
I won't go too much into gameplay details; I plan to review Diablo II soon, so I can just tell you about that instead. It would be more worthwhile to list the ways in which Titan Quest's gameplay is NOT identical to Diablo II's:
-You do not pick a character class from the very beginning. Instead, you pick one when your character reaches level 2.
-When you reach level 8, you get the option to dual-class.
-When you die, you are reborn at the last "Rebirth Fountain" you touched. These are scatterd periodically throughout the world. Also, you do not loose any gold when you die.
-The world is not randomly-genrerated, and players are often forced along linear paths through canyons.
Through your quest, you will go through three acts, each of which take place in different regions of the ancient world. Again, just like Diablo II, though in that game there were four acts. Unlike Diablo II, however, the acts are pretty much the same except for appearances. Egypt is just like Greece except with sand and tougher monsters. China is just like Egypt but with Buddha statues and tougher monsters. The expansion pack adds a fourth act to the game, set in the Underworld, and this offers a bit more variety. Still, it ultimately feels like more of the same.
This game is long. Very, very long. It will take most players several days to get throuh Act I their first time through. Unfortunately, what makes it long is repetition: you go through miles of wilderness battleing thousands of monsters, over and over. This sounds fun, but gets old very fast. It doesn't help that, both in single-player and multi-player moddes, all the monsters respawn every time you quit the game and load it up again. Yes, even the "unique" boss enemies. If you decide to take a break from the game before getting all the way through one of the massive areas, you start back as much as a mile away from your destination as where you left off, and have to fight all those same monsters over again.
The graphics, on the other hand, are quite nice. Titan Quest is, without a doubt, the most visually appealing isometic game I have ever seen. You'll encounter lovely water effects, pleasant-looking fields of grain swaying gently in the breeze (then getting trampled as a pack of centaurs charges up it to kill you), birds flittering through the air, and impressive vistas. If you are a graphics hound, you may be able to squeeze at least a bit of satisfaction from this.
Now, on to the multiplayer! Titan Quest has a free online matchmaking service much like Diablo II. A single game can have up to about a dozen players adventuring cooperatively or fighting each other. Due to the size of the enviroments, however, it can be difficult for players to actually find each in the world other once they join a game.
Mutliplayer mode opens up a new realm of strategy. The different classes and secondary classes all come into play to create a dynamic team effort. There's some real synergy in the way the classes are designed to work together to launch coordinated assaults on the enemies.
Actually getting those assaults coordinated can be a hassle, though, since the chat system has limied functionality. Players can talk to all other players in the same game. You can't talk to people while you are still looking for a game, you can't talk to people who are in a different game, and you can't choose to speak only to players in your party.
All in all, Titan Quest simply has no identity of its own. It desperately wants to be Diablo II, and fails to do anything beyond merely mimicing its inspiration. I can't recomend Titan Quest to anyone, because the kind of people who will like it are going to like Diablo II a lot more.
My Rating: 3 stars out of 5.
***
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