So, I've been a bad, bad bloggertorialist the last few weeks while I finished up my summer terms. I can't say that I've been entirely swamped by classes, presentations, exams, and the like, though. You see, once the latest patch for Titan Quest hit the vast intellectual void known as The Intarweb, my problems with constant and consistent crashing with the game ceased. And with this cease of game-ruining problems, I was allowed to partake in uninterrupted hour upon hour of clicking for phat looty goodness in the form of Action/RPG's latest opus.

For all intents and purposes, Titan Quest is Diablo 2's long-lost fraternal twin. Just… Instead of the dark prince making a cameo debut at a climactic moment in the storyline, our sword-swinging, spell-slinging, spear-stabbing hero(ine) has his screen-time shared between gazillion creatures from mythology. In the game's first of three acts, which takes place in Zeus' Greece, we're talking about slaying everything from centaurs to Cyclops as you pitter-patter to and fro from Athens to Sparta and more. Then, just when you get tired of the game's marvelous graphics engine rendering all the pillars your eye can possibly take in, you're transported, via swirling vortex of doom, to follow Imhotep's creepy old self all around the endless deserts and tombs of Egypt. By the time you feel like your brain is going to implode due to the visual redundancy of what is doubtlessly the game's most uninteresting of its themes, you get the opportunity to follow the evils of the mythological world to its completion through China. And, get this: sure you fight through mountains, swamps, and cities of the land of the rising sun… But you also fight on the Great Wall of China. You fight things. On the Great Wall. In case you don't take me on my word for this most miraculous-feeling of gaming feats, check out the following screenshots:



I could rave on and on about just how gorgeous Titan Quest is but, really, I think even I'd get tired of myself. So now, I'll move on to what is probably the most important aspect of action/RPG: the character customization. When you start the game off, you may feel underwhelmed by the options you're presented with; a paltry choice over the gender of your digital brood and the color of his/her tunic. It's not until you gather up enough of them 'thar experience points to hit level two that you really get the first step in choosing what will really make your character as super-special as each and every teeny-weeny snowflake that hits the ground during your average Antarctic day. It is at this second level where you choose between one of the game's eight masteries: warfare, earth or storm magic, defense, or four other equally cool areas of combative study. Then, at the moment you hit level eight, you choose a secondary specialty that will ultimately define your character's class. For instance, choosing warfare and storm will make your character a "Thane." Warfare and defense will make him a "Conqueror." And, for the character I use to play through the entirety of the single-player's easiest campaign (epic is unlocked once you beat the game once, and legendary once you beat the game on epic), a warfare and rogue character made my lovely Mittenses an "Assassin." And boy, what a sweet, sweet campaign career that specialty combo has provided me.

In an effort to try and convey the wide variety of play styles which Titan Quest's character development system allows. When I first began the game, I chose to play as an Earth Magic (Fire/Earth magic) and Spirit Magic (Energy/Life-sucking and a wide variety of other stuff I never invested points in) character. For the first half of the Greece act, I employed solely the use of fireball and my "mini-meteor" spell -- the latter sends a hefty fireball in an arc pattern to the target destination of your choosing; once it hits that spot, it does massive damage and the enemy (or, if it's a skeleton of something, pieces of that enemy) flying through the air courtesy of very impressive physics code -- and the projectile effect of my staff weapon. This got me by very well, but eventually I got tired of using a staff as my primary weapon. I put some points into my Earth magic's enchant which puts some hefty buffs on my melee weapon as well as putting a fair amount of attribute points into my strength. Within a few levels, I was able to deal a fairly impressive amount of melee damage (while also relying on my spells as first or secondary attacks) purely due to some well-placed changes to my character's setup. I wasn't able to sustain a whole lot of damage, but at that point I was doing so much damage to my enemies that it really wasn't a huge concern so long as I worked at improving my armor as time went on.

For the character that I used to beat the entirety of the game (solely as a single-player attempt; I'll get into the co-op in a moment), I created an Assassin (Warfare/Rogue). After going through a half dozen of experimental characters through single-player and multiplayer co-op, this is the class that finally really kept me interested enough in his progression to make it through Titan Quest's 30-40+ hours of gameplay. Instead of trying to make my assassin into more of a tank-like character, I decided on making my little Mittenses into a brutal fighting machine who relied solely on his high DPS (damage per second) via dual-wielded swords rather than the ability to take a lot of hits or manage a crowd of enemies very well. And, as my trip through the campaign progressed, I needed to continually upgrade him with new weapons in order to keep my damage rate high enough to allow me to quickly dispatch a group of enemies before my fairly low armor and health gave way. And this style of play, along with an increased emphasis on continually finding new and better items, was so much for me that I have no doubt that I'll end up playing through the more difficult epic campaign with this same character.



I'm primarily a single-player kind of gamer when it comes to the hack-n-slash variety of games. I never even bothered to take Diablo 2 on Battle.net for some co-op fun (though I'm told that's really where it's at when it comes to that game), but a bunch of my friends randomly got a hold of me on Xfire after seeing me playing Titan Quest one day and grabbed me for some co-op action… And I can't even relate just how much fun it was. There were a total of four of us (one fighter, one huntress, and two casters), and the amount of fun we had as we played through the game using Teamspeak was incredibly surprising for me. The game's co-op scales the difficulty of the enemies based on the number of people in your party (I believe each game supports up to six players), and while our four/five-person trip through the normal difficulty was fairly easy — save for a death here and there — the higher campaign difficulties for higher-level characters are, supposedly, of such a degree of danger to provide for an excessively challenging endeavor.

Throughout this review I have continually mentioned the fact that there are three difficulties to play through Titan Quest on. For the cavepersons out there who have yet to actually experience the exuberance that can be had while playing a hack-n-slash game, these difficulty levels aren't handled in a traditional game fashion. For your first run through the game using any newly-created character, you're generally forced into playing the "normal" campaign which has items and monsters which will progress alongside you at a slightly slower rate (the campaign will, most likely, be a cakewalk for most people). Once you beat the normal campaign, the "epic" difficulty is unlocked for you; this contains far more difficult enemies and, to reward the extra difficulty, far cooler loot from enemies. I haven't played too deeply into the epic campaign yet, but the couple hours I've spent with it thus far have proven to be just as entertaining as my initial run through the game.



The game has some definite flaws worth pointing out, though (and, yes, I'm sorry I held off on the flaws until the last couple of paragraphs like every other publication alive). First of all, I'm sure that getting the T-rating was important, but games like this generally just go for the M-rating for a reason: the violence helps gameplay. And I'm not saying this just because I'm a fairly sadistic gamer at times, but these kinds of games have so much going on the screen at one time that the blood/gore works as some excellent feedback for differentiating between the live enemies and the ones which are dead as doornails; not to mention that the blood is useful for really noticing when you do and don't hit an enemy. Towards the end of the game you generally have enough effects attached to your attacks that each hit on an enemy has swirls upon swirls of particle effects, but in the early parts of your quest this isn't the case. I found myself wondering whether or not I was actually hitting an enemy at times (I had to get into the habit of monitoring each enemy's life bar during battle to remedy this).

The other main problem with Titan Quest is just how sluggish it is at times; no matter what my graphical settings, the game moved at a pace not entirely unlike a snail during certain areas. It didn't matter whether I had nearly all effects maxed out along with enabling antialiasing or just went with the lowest detail possible -- the game is just incredibly sluggish here and there. For the most part, the slowdown isn't really that big of a deal, but there are definitely a few areas in the game which were consistently slow for reasons that I couldn't discern (not an excess of enemies or other models on-screen). I was hoping this would be something that a post-release patch would address, but alas, that is not the case.

One of the things that the patches have addressed, though, is the game's love of crashing. When it was first released, the game would crash incessantly; whether it be five minutes into a play session or two hours. After a couple of days with this, I eventually just quit playing the game entirely (hence the reason this review is so late coming). It wasn't until the v1.08 patch that the game became playable for me.

Overall, though, the game is pretty fantastic. I was never a huge fan of Diablo 2 when it was first released; it was fun, but I always got tired of the thing shortly after the beginning of its second act. Thus far, with Titan Quest, I've sunk in a solid eighty hours (according to the almighty Xfire) into the thing. So, while some Diablo 2 fans will scream their pure hatred and loathing about how Titan Quest can by no means ever even begin to compete with Satan's chosen sequel, I for one think that this is one of the best action/RPGs to ever hit the market. The graphics are spectacular, the game offers a lot of variety in both its scenery and items, and the wide amount of masteries to mix-and-match make this a great game with a whole lot of replay value. Throw in the multiplayer co-op with support for up to six players and you've got yourself one hell of a game.

Even if, you know, Diablo holds the rights to the whole hell thing.