Titan Quest – The Quest to Fail
I don’t often feel moved to review games… But this one has forced me to make an exception. Mostly because it tries so hard to be a good game and then fails so completely at it.
The Game
Think Diablo 2, except in Greece… mostly. You end up being a Greek hero who travels from Greece to Egypt to “The Orient” to Olympus. You character moves through these areas by strangling and then desecrating the corpse of good mythology.
The story starts out with a somewhat solid feel. You’re Greek, Greece is in trouble, the Greek gods need your help. Then you go to Egypt, where apparently there might be Egyptian gods, but mostly everyone needs your help to put Greek mythology right. Then you get to China (or The Orient which lacks any cohesion) where the ancestor spirits have been upset by Greek gods they have never heard of. Luckily this whole story is told through very small text boxes that include no dialog options and fail to involve you with the speaker in any way, shape, or form.
In other words, you interact with the story much like in D2, but without a fancy font, and with a string of narrators you couldn’t actually care less about.
My Loot is On Fire
Loot is a big part of dungeon running games. Luckily Titan Quest throws thousands of metrics tons of loot at you. The problem is that it has all the usefulness of several thousand tons of scrap metal.
I rarely got awesome pieces of equipment. Thins that were drool worthy. In fact, the Oedipus Armor I picked up was so awesome that it lasted me all the way through Greece and Egypt… Unfortunately that same piece of armor mostly sucked about halfway through Greece. Which means that every other bit of loot I picked up was much worse. The same applied to weapons. This meant that for very short periods of time I felt inhumanly strong, followed by vast periods of time I felt like crying.
However, you can modify or “gem” up items. They give you talisman, coin, thins that you can attach to your items. However you may only ever attach one booster to any item, and most magic equipment cannot be modified… So you have one or two extremely magical artifacts that lost their usefulness but cannot be replaced, and a bunch of lackluster items made questionably passable by a single booster. It is very much like the Diablo 2 socket system, if that system were neutered, rendered legless, and then left in the desert to die.
The World and the Creatures in it
The world is something to marvel at. It really does look good. So do many of the creatures you mash with hammers. Not only that, but bodies fly through the air with great rag doll like physics.
Seriously, you should take a look at it, that stuff is pretty awesome.
The sound track is also spot on. Each realm has quite a bit of depth added by the score this bummer of a game is set to. And now we must go back to listing problems.
Half of the game feels very open and half feels very guided. Translation:
Long winding corridors lead to vast open areas that lead to long winding corridors. What this means is that you will take the most ridiculously windy road through entire countries ever conceived.
The world is enormous. So enormous that I often found myself checking the clock and wondering when the hell I would get to the next place. This mostly happened because the story was so horrible I never cared about where I was. It was just endless streams of creature camps, caves that all look the same, and some very well designed key locations.
And about those key locations…
In some places the grand architecture is your enemy. Mostly because big structural elements don’t become transparent, and suddenly you have no idea where you or your foes are. Grand art should not hamper game play.
But, let us talk about creatures!
There are many many different creatures to keep you interested. Some of them are the standard disposable zombies, skeletons, cat people, spider people, alligator people, tiger people, rat people… These also all come in the fighter, archer, mage varieties. Then there are tons of elemental sprites, demons, undead demons, spirits, cat people… you get the idea. And for all of the creatures, the AI is generally bad. Not that you should expect much AI in a dungeon crawl, but Titan Quest compensates in an odd way.
They spam enemies… but not in a good way. Instead you tend to get near invulnerable hordes of fighters back by 30 mages, while being flanked by archers. This is complicated by the absolute failure by your equipment to be useful. This is then compounded by the fact that you have resistances for all of the elements, damage, and piercing damage. And in these epic monster spam mobs all of these damage types will be present, which makes it impossible to plan ahead for encounters and switch out equipment. I only died four times, but I also did a great deal of running and screaming.
This was also the only game where the introduction of new enemies made me cringe. Mostly because if something was physically large, the damage dealt scaled geometrically, except for bosses (excluding ye olde final boss). Anytime something new and large approached, it could probably kill you in a the same way your pet goldfish and the garbage disposal hate each other. This resulted in more running and screaming, and spamming health potions.
The Final Boss
I won’t say who it is, what it is, or anything else… Let me just tell you, I failed to beat it.
The final boss does epic damage, heals itself rapidly, and kills you in ways so quickly as to defy reason.
Part of my problem may have been playing a melee character. But I’m that jerk who loves playing a barbarian in this sort of game. Even though they punish me for it every time. Either way, the final boss made it clear that the whole 3 realms of trials and leveling were meaningless.
So my recommendation?
Find a friend that has this game, stare at the cool art for 5 minutes, then leave and never think of it again.
Also, play games that suck less.
i have never heard of this game. i guess i will check it out on ign or something, thanks for posting.
Chris Schaffer Reply:
September 16th, 2008 at 10:12 am
The IGN review is odd (and I recommend reading it), it gives some complaints similar to mine, they liked similar things. Overall the the tone is much more positive, but they never give any stunning praise to the game, then they give it an 8.1 rating, which seemed higher than the reviewers comments.
Even I would give the game a 6.0-6.5 rating. It has some value, but it fails to be better than anything else in the genre while sharing many of the more frustrating problems.