Titan Quest Review

Titan Quest takes its identity from older hack-and-slash games such as Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo franchise. It is a third-person, dungeon claw RPG, which takes place in the mythological world of Greek mythology, where war, pillage and monster-slaying are now a way of life. Beastmen, harpies, centaurs, and many other fascinating creatures from ancient Greece roam the land freely. Players are placed in the shoes of an inspiring spartan warrior, who must traverse the vast landscape of Greece to track down and slaughter its deadliest monsters and free the people from their oppression. Now remastered for 8th generation consoles, the long and fearsome journey continues.

The game begins with you creating your character. Here, you can select between a male or female, and select the colour of your tunic. Facial customization and hairstyles aren’t exactly important in a game of this playing style but it would have been satisfying to see a larger variety of options for avatars.

Titan Quest players similarly to games such as Diablo. It’s played over the top of the player character and is set in a vast open world filled with caves, cities, and NPC’s to interact with. The game’s story has players traverse different areas of the world, which are connected to each other via portals that act as fast travel points. Every area is filled with monsters of different varieties to be fort off and caves and secret areas to be explored. Exploration and combat are rewarded with loot which consists of armour pieces, weapons, consumables like health and mana potions, and jewellery, which provides bonuses to skills.

Quests are provided by interacting with NPC’s, which also provide brief information about their lives. These short dialogue sections can begin to get old for some and you may eventually ignore them altogether, but they manage to provide enough information to help immerse the player in the world they live in. Quests dished out may mostly involve clearing out a horde of beasts, exploring a cave, or killing a boss. Upon completing them, players are rewarded with experience points, gold a trinket which could add to their armour or power.

The game’s combat system uses a variety of techniques for players to use while combating monsters. The largest factor, melee combat, revolves around players using weapons such as swords, axes, bows, and spears, of increasing variety and strength. It is, however, the weakest aspect of the game’s combat system. The simple swishing and jabbing of swords and spears quickly become tedious affairs and they sap much of the fun from potentially exhilarating battles. It also doesn’t help that selecting between different enemies is a headache. Many monsters, especially Beastmen, in the early stages of the game, always attack in large groups, making it inevitable for players to get surrounded.

Despite shallow melee combat, the games skill systems do a sufficient job of making fights more interesting. As players complete missions, given to them by NPC’s, and kill enemies, players will gain a level, which grants them experience points, which they could use to upgrade their strength, dexterity and intelligence. Upgrading specific perks also increases resistances to sources like fire, magic, and lightning. The most important form of progression, however, is the skill tree system, known as masteries. On two different occasions, players could select up to two masteries out of six in total. They include abilities related to magical damage like lightning or melee-based action. In each mastery, players spend skill points to unlock different abilities related to the mastery they have chosen and to upgrade those they have already selected. Once two masteries are chosen, subclasses are created, which combines both masteries together to form the class. For example, selecting the Nature and Earth classes creates the summoner class, while Defence and Warfare form the Conqueror class. the individual skills and masteries are a great addition to the combat system and help to bring a much larger level of variety to fights, even though the visual feedback remains poor.

The game also comes with a multiplayer component where players could enter another player’s game and join them on their own journey throughout the world. Despite some connectivity issues, the multiplayer is a nice addition to the game as it allows for a much more cooperative experience.

The environments richly detailed and immersive. While the character models and graphical fidelity are rather dated, the remaster does an admirable job of improving the game’s overall style. The Sound design can occasionally be inconsistent, as beasts could make the same sounds and weapons don’t give off satisfying sound effects to match the impact of their blows. The PS4 version also contains some minor graphical and AI issues throughout its world. frequents textures could become static and NPC’s can begin to walk at walls, ignoring the path next to them. The game also fatally crashes on several occasions, which was always frustrating. Lastly, the game brings an awkward way of picking up loot, which immediately becomes a pain. Since you can’t scroll through loot on the ground with the D-pad on your controller, players will end up constantly shifting their positions to pick up items that they want.

Titan Quest is a game in which fans of some old-school role-playing techniques will find enjoyment in, especially if they played it upon its initial release in 2006. The combat system is rather dry and the remaster brings some severe technical issues with it but the game provides enough variety and a deep sense of exploration to keep most players intrigued. The game’s world is also conveyed well through its lush and beautiful environments and the number of fascinating creatures of its mythology. Despite some drawbacks, Titan Quest is an enjoyable experience that fans of dungeon crawling and role-playing should eventually give a go.

REVIEW CODE: A PS4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.