Titan Quest (2006)

There is one thing I absolutely love about Titan Quest: it still continuosly gets Addons to the basegame instead of a remake. Many, many games that got a remake actually just needed an Addon way more than that, because their graphics still hold up until today and some new content would have been gorgeous (looking at my two favourites wc3 and d2 here).

So, although I love the fact that Titan Quest gets Addons, very ironically it's among those games of the 2000s that definitely need a remake. It looks and feels outdated and it's hard to grasp why people loved it even back then.

The combat is clumpsy, slow, superficial and unsatisfying. The map assets are stale and repetitive, the map and the dungeons without any points of interest and the looting is super meh.

One plus is that the dialogues aren't cringy, since they're mostly cringy in A-RPGs. They're not good, though.

I haven't played the Addons, though. Should I?

At long last I have finally finished the main quest line for Titan Quest. Overall I can say it's a very fun game. At times I felt that it dragged in certain places, namely Act 3. This was probably my own fault though for taking large breaks from the game which made it feel longer.

Titan Quest is the story of a player who starts off worse than dirt that gets wrecked by basic enemies that eventually ascends to become stronger even than the gods, by killing everything.

The enemy variety in this game is great. Lots of things to kill based in mythology. I will say that I appreciated it more in the first act, where the monsters were Greek, because I am more familiar with Greek mythology, but I recognized some monsters from the Egyptian and Chinese chapters. I'm not very familiar with any mythology, so things being wrong will have flown over my head.

The combat itself is standard Hack N Loot click the enemies until they are dead and use your abilities or chug a potion when needed. I personally played a character that was all about the passive bonuses, particularly damage and auto healing bonuses, and activated effects. I didn't really use the magic spells all that much, unfortunately. They seemed very interesting but not a good, to me, as just being able to hit things better and survive being hit better.

Graphically the game is nothing to write home about today, but still looks pretty decent for a 2006 game. It definitely doesn't look ugly unless you zoom in on some of the models. I appreciate the small details, like grass pulling back from you or small animals hopping around.

Sound design is alright. The music is decent enough but I had to listen to Spotify halfway through Act 3 because I was just getting bored of the game's music. The sound effects are there, the voice acting is OK. The characters don't sound like caricatures, most of the time.

Writing is pretty decent for a game where you just run around and murder things for loot. It's not a particularly deep or engrossing story, but it's fun and the way they tie four different culture's myths together is fairly neat. Sometimes the main storyline quest givers would monologue on for a little bit too long, but exposition and a silent protagonist kind of end up being that way.

I didn't run into many glitches. Besides one where if I right clicked in the upper left hand corner of the screen it would cause the game to become unplayably laggy. I don't understand, but I figure if I just don't, that would solve most of my issues.

Overall, it's a fun game. I doubt very much that it is the pinnacle of the genre, but as my introduction it's been very good. Now I'm on to play Immortal Throne, the expansion for Titan Quest.