Titan Quest Anniversary Edition Review (Flow)
Nostalgia Pass: Titan Quest Anniversary Edition
I remember playing the original Titan Quest back when I was finishing high school. At the time, it felt like a natural progression of Diablo - a game that takes the basic principles of the hack-and-slash legend and innovates on them, adding several interesting ideas of its own.
Even after all this time, though, I still can't really tell you what this game is about. A bunch of mythological monsters are on the loose, I guess? And it's your job to stop them? It doesn't matter, though - the story is just there to provide a framework for the hack-and-slash gameplay.
Like in any Diablo clone worth its weight in code, you'll spend the vast majority of your playtime doing one of two things: killing anything that moves and looting everything that isn't bolted down.
To make the first part of this game loop a little easier, you get to choose two different skill masteries for your character. On paper, this sounds like a great idea: having two masteries should give you the ability to combine skills and create interesting synergies.
In practice, this simply means picking your skill from two separate skill trees. There are no capstone fusion skills and the synergies are so minor they aren't worth fussing over. It feels like the devs missed a trick here - there was an opportunity to truly innovate with the mechanics and create a real point of difference from other games in the genre.
The second part is pretty standard, with items divided into different rarities and power levels and a ton of legendary item sets that provide additional bonuses when combined. So many legendary item sets, in fact, that you'll have a pretty hard time finding just two matching items, let alone fully decking out your character.
The presentation is pretty uneven. Titan Quest takes plenty of inspiration from classical Eurasian mythology when it comes to enemy designs. In mechanical terms, though, most of the enemies fit into standard categories you'll see in other, similar games. Almost none of the monsters have the interesting abilities of their mythological counterparts, and stronger varieties of the same enemy type are typically just a color swap of the original model.
The same lack of enthusiasm is evident in the environment design. For the vast majority of the game, you're traversing the overworld and fighting enemies, while occasionally delving into caves and dungeons to solve side quests and/or get that sweet, sweet loot. The game is divided into three major acts: Greece, Egypt, and an amalgam of Near East and Asia.
By the time you get to the third act, you'll notice that the overworld is a lot more linear, and there are far fewer optional dungeons to explore. I'm guessing that by this point, the developers were tired of coming up with new stuff and just wanted to finish the game.
The controls are pretty standard for this type of game - you attack and move using the mouse, and everything else is done through keyboard hotkeys. One thing of note is that all the enemies and in-game items seem to have a very small "clickable" area, even when they are a lot bigger than the player character. This can lead to some pretty frustrating moments, especially if you're playing a ranged build, and ESPECIALLY during a frantic fight, when you're trying to hit an enemy but end up just walking up to them.
The graphics and models are surprisingly detailed for the time. For instance, groups of humanoid enemies will spawn with each individual sporting a different melee weapon, and these weapons will clatter to the ground as separate models once the enemies are defeated.
This also extends to looting, where each item falls out of a chest as a separate model. It's not unusual to have to wait for an item to stop rolling on the ground before you can pick it up, and some even fly off the map due to the janky engine.
The flip side of this is that the game is pretty unoptimized. Even with a modern rig, I still had some stuttering and a couple of pretty jarring FPS drops.
Upon this latest revisit, I can say that Titan Quest still holds up pretty well. Some of the ideas it tries to implement are a bit hit-or-miss, but the core loop is still solid and the overall experience is satisfying enough.
With that in mind, Titan Quest is the first game I'm giving a new category or recommendation: Nostalgia Pass. If you're like me and have a fondness for the late 90s and early 2000s era of hack-and-slash games, by all means, give it a spin. But for younger gamers or those without this particular emotional attachment, I'd probably recommend a more recent title, like Path of Exile, Diablo 4, or even Grim Dawn, if you want to stick with the same development team.