Titan Quest Review
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It's great that Titan Quest gives players a reason to keep playing the campaign, either with a new character starting over, or continuing on in the Epic and Legendary difficulty settings with an existing character. The problem the game has is that it's barely fun enough to play even once, and it's difficult to imagine that people would want to play through it multiple times, with new characters, old characters, or any character. You might find it strange that after praising Titan Quest for four paragraphs, I'm now turning around and saying it's not fun to play, but like I said, developer Iron Lore Entertainment either did things very well or very poorly, and we're now into the (poorly) part of the review. The problem is very basic. Titan Quest's campaign is terrible. You'd think that Iron Lore would have had some fun with the premise, like Reflexive did with Lionheart and Ensemble did with Age of Mythology, but you never get to interact with any of the gods or heroes. Every so often you meet a storyteller who briefly describes one of the myths or legends, but that's as close as you get. You don't pal around with Hercules, or accept a quest from Isis, or have a drinking competition with Bacchus. The game looks like you're in ancient Greece and Egypt and so forth, but as for what you actually do, you could be anywhere.
Worse, what you actually do isn't all that exciting. Obviously, since Titan Quest is an action role-playing game, most of the game involves clicking on and killing hundreds of enemies. That's a given. Where Iron Lore missteps is that's all you do. The quests aren't all that different from the regular killing of enemies, and the bosses are a joke. There is rarely anything tricky or exciting about them. They just have more hit points and hit harder than regular enemies, and you have to quaff more healing potions than usual when you're fighting them. Ho hum.
Even the storyline lacks imagination. Early on you learn about creatures called Telkines who helped the titans in their war with the Greek gods. Well, in Act One you have to track down and defeat a Telkine, and then in Act Two you have to track down and defeat a Telkine, and then in Act Three you have to -- do you sense the trend yet? -- track down and defeat yet another Telkine. It's difficult to imagine a developer taking an intriguing premise and then doing so little with it, but that's the case with Iron Lore and Titan Quest. There aren't any interesting characters, there isn't any memorable dialogue, and you're not given any choices for what to do. Basically, there isn't any incentive given to continue playing the game (there aren't even any cut scenes after the opening cinematic sequence), other than to see what monsters will come next. If you want more from your role-playing games than just combat, then Titan Quest isn't the game for you.
Finally, I've heard from a lot of people having problems with Titan Quest, to the point where the plethora of bugs has prevented them from playing the game at all. However, Titan Quest worked flawlessly for me. I think it crashed maybe five times in the 75+ hours that I spent with it, and nothing else went wrong. I've also heard from people who played Titan Quest and thought it was a lot of fun, but it just put me to sleep. I hated every forest that was just there to pad the playing time, and every cave that didn't have anything interesting in it (which is almost all of them). If you want to play an action role-playing game with a long but somewhat boring campaign, then I'd recommend Space Hack over Titan Quest, just because its purchase price is less than half as much. Wait for Titan Quest to hit the bargain bin first, or at least wait for another patch or two to come out.
