Titan Quest Anniversary Edition Review (Trip Fisk)
TL;DR review:
It is an old, but decent Diablo 2 ripoff. Its kind of easy, but it can be fun going on a murder spree and directly causing the extinction of entire races of mythological creatures. $20 is a bit much, but goes on sale all the time for $5 or less which is a deal.
------------------tl;dr part----------------
I remember spending pocket change for a brand new Titan Quest Gold Edition (what would later be called the 'anniversary edition' on Steam) at a Half-Price Books between 10-15 years ago.
Not long after that, I came across something on the web written by someone at Iron Lore Entertainment about the developer going out of business. Specifically over Titan Quest being a major financial failure. I thought TQ was pretty good! How could this be? Well the main reason TQ failed was, much to the anger and frustration of the author, out of control piracy. Titan Quest was wildly popular to the point everyone was playing it, but something like 80% of that player base was using a pirated version. A big tell piracy was bad was their support was filled with demands to fix a 'bug' that crashed the game at a specific place every single time. What was the bug? Titan Quest does a validation check and would immediately shut down if it didn't have a valid key. So pirates smeared Titan Quest as buggy and attacked the developer as bad programmers. The negative word of mouth made the game not sell causing Iron Lore to go bankrupt.
Now Titan Quest is somehow back! And this 16 year old game has 3 more expensive $15-$20 DLCs for some reason! And they might make more! And TQ still feels every bit as much like a ghetto version of Diablo 2 than it ever did!
BONUS: if you play on consoles, the Titan Quest DLCs actually have broken achievements that haven't and likely never will be fixed!