8.4

Titan Quest has been making waves in the gaming community. While other folks were releasing the same ol’ medieval, kobold killing RPGs, Ironlore was creating an adventure that’s uniquely Greek. As you battle through Greece, Egypt and other exotic lands you will face Satyrs, Centaurs and other legendary beasts from Greek mythology as you collect loot, experience and mystic powers. Check out our Titan Quest review below to get the full scoop on this fine game!

Graphics

Titan Quest graphics are beautiful. When your character runs through a wheatfield the stalks ripple and sway behind them. The same goes for grass, flowers and any other foliage in the game. When flying creatures attack, their wings cause the grass around them to ripple.
The view is a 3/4 isometric perspective that allows you to zoom in or out using the mouse wheel. Greek temples, pathways and landscape are painstakingly rendered in brilliant detail. The movement between areas is seamless, you never have to wait for an area to load. The only real gripe that we had about the graphics is that you can’t rotate the camera to look around at all.

Sound

Titan Quest’s sound meets expectations. It’s not intrusive which automatically means that it’s pretty good. There are subtle tracks of music played at different points in the game but generally the world is fairly quiet. The voice acting is excellent. The weapons and creature sounds are pretty standard. We would like to see a bit more ambiance in the world but we were pleased with the sound.

Gameplay

The gameplay is perfect, though not extremely original. Titan Quest plays just like Diablo. You venture forth from a small town, fighting your way through hoards of monsters to save the world. Along the way you pass through multiple other towns where you may activate portals. You can teleport to any portal that you’ve activated by creating a temporary portal. There are loads and loads of loot to pick up in Titan Quest so the portal is a necessary feature for selling off the stuff you don’t need.
Titan Quest is unique in that a monster drops what they are carrying. If a satyr charges you wearing a leather breastplate and weilding a club, that’s what you can expect them to drop.
You “save” by stopping at soul shrines. If you die, you return to the soul shrine for a small cost. You are revived with all your gear intact. When your health drops to a dangerous level you are warned by the sound of your heart pounding. This makes it easy to decide when to run when you’re waist deep in bad guys. We do have some beef with the original save system since you must complete a “level” or you have to fight all the way back through it before you can save. The most recent patch seems to have improved the saving, inventory and some game crash issues on some systems.
We will refrain from spoiling the game by letting you know much more. Suffice it to say that spell management, leveling, quests and other game management are smoothly and easily managed. Titan Quest is a twist on a classic genre that is well executed and well-worth playing.

Longetivity

Titan Quest is a linear role-playing game. You can customize your gear and abilities quite a bit but the game moves in a pretty straight line. We feel like this isn’t a bad thing. Books are linear, movies are linear, games can be linear too! You play through a story. It’s fun but it is one story. The levels and events do not appear to be randomly generated whatsoever. There are side quests but not mass amounts of them. We docked Titan Quest slightly for this on the longevity rating for this reason. But we do want to assure you that the story is good and the levels are fun. We didn’t mind fighting through the levels in a row. Ideally we will see some good community content including mods and custom levels for some fun variation on the adventure.

Technical

Titan Quest installed fine. We didn’t have to jump through any hoops to be started up an in game quickly. However, there were some crashing issues that seemed to occur when we accessed inventory. Titan Quest would dump to desktop. When we got back into the game our character would be saved but we would have to start out from the last soul shrine we touched. This got very frustrating but patching the game has completely fixed the problem.
Our gaming rig runs Titan Quest very smoothly at the highest resolution and max settings. We do experience some slowdowns when moving from daylight into a cave, around lots of fire, or when mobbed by lots of baddies casting spells. We also noticed occasional refresh lines at the edges of textures when we were moving quickly. We want to stress that these are pretty minor issues that had a minimal effect on gameplay.

Our test system was an Asus motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 chip, an nVidia GeForce 7600GT graphics card and one gig of dual channel ram. We also tried the game on a much lower end system using a 256mb AGP card and a 64-bit AMD processor. It ran great a lower resolutions and settings.