Review: Titan Quest Anniversary Edition

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I've been in love with Titan Quest for a long time. I picked information technology upwardly on a lark years agone and found myself utterly sucked into the epic journey across ancient Greece and beyond. Plenty more ARPGs accept come and congenital on the formula in the intervening years, and it's hard to say they don't exercise what TQ does better. Still, there's at least one place where this title still shines, and information technology'southward plenty to proceed me fighting and annexation for years to come.

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Titan Quest drops you lot on the banking concern of a pastoral Greek river every bit simple, nondescript warrior. Satyrs, harpies, and other beasts of legend have risen upwards to torment the populace and yous just happen to be in the right place to kill them all and boodle their magically-enchanted pants. To unravel the plot behind this monstrous scourge you'll travel to Arab republic of egypt, Babylon, Red china, and fabled lands beyond, battling the mythical creatures of each. Figures like Leonidas and the Oracle of Delphi will besides exist on hand to assistance guide yous in your quest.

Dissimilar most ARPGs, you practise not choose your class at graphic symbol creation. Instead, when you proceeds your first level you choose one of nine Masteries. Each is a skill tree representing a subject such every bit warfare, hunting, storm magic, necromancy, and so on. Again at level eight you cull some other Mastery, meaning every character is a combination of skills from 2 of these disciplines. Equipment is not tied to specific classes, either, and so yous tin make such motley combinations as a dreamweaving necromantic axeman, a pyromaniac forest warden, or a heavily-armored mace-wielding stormcaller.

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In Titan Quest'due south original release there were certain combinations of Masteries that simply were not viable, only the Anniversary Edition has washed a massive amount of rebalancing to make any character you want piece of work. About notably the overpowered Dream Mastery was brought back in line with the others, and pets were buffed to make minion-heavy Masteries like Nature and Tempest more viable. Success is nonetheless going to depend on proper balancing of your skill points, which might be unintuitive to new players since you tin can invest in both specific skills and the Mastery itself to increase your stats and unlock new skills.

Gear is the other place y'all'll need to work to keep upwards, but there's plenty to choose from and plenty to exercise with information technology. Equipment drops in familiar rarities, with drops conspicuously increasing in quality as yous progress. Y'all'll also discover charms and relics that can be added to equipment to requite them new bonuses, or combined using formulas to create a unique and powerful class of gear yous won't find via drops. There'south a lot of strategy not just to choosing equipment but in customizing it to work for your build and against the monsters you lot'll face.

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These are solid foundations for an ARPG, but even I accept to acknowledge the game they are built upon is dated. Titan Quest was very much a love-letter of the alphabet to Diablo Two, with 3D graphics and freer movement and a few other improvements but the aforementioned basic gameplay. Don't expect the visceral clashes of Diablo Three or the depth of Path of Exile, considering TQ is light on active abilities and combat feedback. Despite your Mastery combinations you tend to just have a one-half-dozen active skills to utilize, with your passives doing a lot more work keeping you strong and alive than in well-nigh games. In that location's also non much recourse confronting especially challenging monsters if your build is lacking confronting them, and the final boss remains a seriously crude jump in difficulty that tin can fire through some characters like newspaper.

Despite the dated gameplay and remaining balance problems, I still consider Titan Quest one of the all-time ARPGs I've e'er played. The reason for this isn't something that's a major consideration for most people, but it means a lot to me. My favorite games are the ones that feel similar true journeys, from humble ancestry to bully and wondrous things. Plenty of ARPGs let yous raise a hero from null but Titan Quest is the one that lives upward to its proper noun, taking you from the sandals of a simple traveler to the divine boots of a god-slayer. A large office of this success is found in the map design, because almost the entire world of TQ is contiguous. When you travel across Hellenic republic and China y'all are really travelling across mountains and valleys on an epic pilgrimage into destiny. No other game has given me the aforementioned sense of living out an epic poem so tangibly, and I respect the hell out of Titan Quest and its developers for succeeding on that front.

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The anile graphics still concur up in portraying this journey, with snowy steppes and burning deserts and verdant farmlands. The sound design is good but tends to exist more easygoing than near ARPGs, giving Titan Quest a more relaxed experience than its peers. On peak of its original merits the Anniversary Edition has introduced a host of fixes, tweaks, and features, near notably a speed option for the game. This is non a pocket-sized consideration, either. Yous can seriously prepare the entire game to double speed, vehement through battles and edifice your graphic symbol faster than in merely about any other game. With these improvements to an already solid game, I experience non merely comfortable but compelled to recommend Titan Quest to any fan of the genre.

tagged with Adventure, ARPG