Titan Quest

Only Available on PC
Approximate Playtime: 30 hours

RATING: 7/10

Titan Quest is what one would get after letting Borderlands and World of Warcraft smash together. It's not an MMO, but up to roughly 16 players can party up on a server and kill monsters together. The end goal of the game is to defeat the evil creatures and become a god, but before that can happen, there must be much leveling up.

This plays a little differently from other RPG's. The Elder Scrolls games start the character off with nothing, and he or she chooses the path the game will follow. World of Warcraft has the player pick a race and class from the very beginning. Mass Effect has the player choose their class to begin with, but has hundreds of different ways to upgrade Shepard and decide on Paragon or Renegade. Titan Quest, though, has a very unique starting point. The player starts off with nothing. Just some clothes and a stick, pretty much, and then told to go out into the world and thrive. After completing quests and such, the player will level up. It's at this point that the player picks a class path. The game lets players get a handle on the game before handing over any unique abilities, and while this may be viewed as a little too hand-hold-y for some, it works out fairly well. The transition into the class actually feels fairy smooth, and it's not even jolting for me to go from hitting things with a club to wielding a magic staff and being the party's healer. This works even better in a situation with three or four players, as natural tendencies like mage, tank, striker, healer, and area of effect fighting styles surface before decisions are made on what class to choose. And by observing each other play, party members can decide where they're needed most, and act accordingly. In short, the game is very user friendly, even for players who aren't used to multiplayer RPG's, or if they haven't played one yet at all. It's a good game for n00bs or veterans.

The way upgrades work is great, too. It forces players to strategically choose what abilities to upgrade to best benefit the party. Points aren't just pumped into different skill trees, they have one of two place to go. One is into making abilities better, but the other is into unlocking ability tiers. Nature mages can summon a wolf to aid in combat at the first tier, but the wolf has upgrades that can only be unlocked after ability points have been spent in the overall class. In other words, they can't be unlocked right away. That may seem very mundane, but there's a reason for it. The game doesn't just let players pick one class, but two. After level 8, players choose a second skill mastery, and that's where the game's level up mechanics work their magic. Should the healer mage put ability points into nature magic, or spirit magic? Should he be a better healer, or should he be able to fend for himself and get spells like Life Leech? Even for an RPG veteran, the game can create some pretty tight spots, which keeps it interesting and fun.

Unfortunately, this is where it starts to fall short. For all of its great potential, the game does something that RPG's should never do. Quantity over quality. There is no greater mistake that can be made in an RPG. Enemies are lifeless and forgettable. Sure, there may be a valley ahead with 400 Satyrs, but they'll all be dead in about five minutes, and you'll have leveled up four times in the process. This doesn't make it a bad game, just an ungraceful game. And because of how mundane the enemies are, the game doesn't tend to hold the players' attention for very long. It doesn't captivate like, for example, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind does. This means that even though it's a fairly small game, it will take forever to beat because you only want to play for about twenty or thirty minutes before quitting because your party just cleared out the fiftieth Centaur camp this week. Granted, it could have been worse, but then again, this review isn't over.

All of the games that I mentioned earlier, The Elder Scrolls, World of Warcracft, Mass Effect, they all have open worlds to explore and conquer. The exception there is Mass Effect, but it does itself justice considering the game world is the entire Milky Way galaxy. Titan Quest is about as linear as Final Fantasy XIII was. (For those that don't know, Final Fantasy XIII's nickname was "Final Fantasy: Hallway" due to how mind-numbingly linear it was.) This makes the experience that much more of a drag. Not only is there four hundred more copy-paste enemies to kill tonight, we get to walk in a straight line again! And just because there's a loot chest in every enemy camp, don't thing there will be any cool items in there, oh no. 99% of every item in a certain class looks exactly the same. Damages, armor ratings, or boosters may vary, but there's nothing interesting to look at. At all. Yes, this is the same problem that Mass Effect's weapons system had, but the difference is that Mass Effect compensated for the lack of variability in weapon skins by making the rest of the game insanely amazing. Therefore, the problem was overlooked. In Titan Quest, however, because there's no tough enemies holding the player's attention or wonderful scenery to look at, the problem with the equipment is blatantly obvious. All these problems come together to make the game very... grind-y.

It does have a small amount of redeeming quality, though. Because the game isn't hardcore, it's great to just sit back and relax with a group of friends and play it after a long day. This is actually the only way the game is bearable due to the fact that the player is at least focused on talking with friends. Playing the game alone just isn't possible.

So what is Titan Quest? An attempt at something different before RPG's were mainstream. Now there are inherent rules to these kinds of things that didn't exist before, but they exist because games like Titan Quest show clearly what not to do when attempting this kind of project. But hey, if you got it in the Humble THQ Bundle, that's a pretty good deal, and it's decent enough to keep in the Steam library. If not, it's a waste of resources and not worth it.