Titan Quest: Immortal Throne Review
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Enchanters deal with relics and charms and arcane formulae. In Titan Quest, if you inserted a relic into a piece of equipment, the insertion was permanent. You couldn't take the relic back out or change your mind and insert a different relic instead. Enchanters change that. For a hefty fee, they can remove a relic from a piece of equipment and then return to you either the relic or the piece of equipment (destroying the other). This is a great improvement, because relics are sometimes hard to find, and equipment is all over the place, so this makes it easy to keep your relics as you improve your equipment. Arcane formulae are used to create artifacts, which are a new type of equipment in Immortal Throne. Each arcane formula requires relics, charms, and/or other artifacts in order to produce an artifact, and you need to bring the ingredients to an enchanter (along with another hefty fee) to have the artifact crafted. Artifacts are kind of fun, but this is another place where I don't know if the addition really adds anything, since characters already had nine equipment slots, and what's the difference between nine and ten? Artifacts also require you to lug around a lot of relics and charms and formulae, and so it's a good thing Iron Lore increased the amount of storage space you get.
Finally, Iron Lore made a bunch of smaller improvements. When you die, your character leaves behind a grave marker, and if you can get back to the marker before you die again, then you'll back get some of your lost experience. You can toggle an option so that you no longer accidentally pick up equipment when you're trying to move around. There are buttons that allow you to auto-sort your inventory. There are expensive scrolls that you can purchase so that you can cast some magic spells. Quest mobs are now labeled with a purple color so that they're easier to identify. And more. Iron Lore touched upon nearly every part of the game.
Conclusion
Overall, I'd say that Titan Quest: Immortal Throne is a great expansion pack for an okay game. Iron Lore Entertainment made all sorts of nice changes, both expected and unexpected, and those changes did a lot to improve some of the problems of the original game. But Titan Quest is still Titan Quest. It's still an action RPG where you have to enjoy killing creatures over and over again, just to gain more experience and to find more equipment.
So if you enjoyed the original Titan Quest, then Immortal Throne is a slam dunk. You should go out and buy it right away. But if you didn't really get into Titan Quest, the answer is a little bit trickier. I played through Titan Quest twice when I wrote my review for it, and I disliked it nearly every step of the way. But when I played the entire campaign again for this review, I liked it a little bit better. It's not going to make me forget Arcanum or Fallout or even Diablo II, but it's now a nice enough diversion, and it's something you might want think about if you're looking for a way to wile away some free time.
