Titan Quest: Eternal Embers Review (Artibius)
DLC verdict: Don't get it
Comment:
So the (probably) final DLC for Titan Quest AE and... it honestly feels like a miss. But getting ahead of myself, let us first talk about the good stuff this DLC brings. Plenty of quality of life improvements and a variety of new potions to buff your character. Also plenty of new unique sets and monster infrequent items that have a decent drop rate.
The story touches on some legends again with some questionable story choices in-between (like why beat up some Tibet monks for no reason when gods are attacking...?). But when you finally start to get caught into the Chinese lore you are thrown to Egypt. And after some time there back again to China. Very odd choice for an already lengthy campaign.
And oh boy is it long. The first act alone takes ages to go through because all the maps are made big and maze-like. Maybe they wanted to add as much as they can. But in that process they forgot what made the original charming - small sections you can go through until the next checkpoint. This causes it to slowly feel like work, getting through each area fighting the same-y enemies. There are some secret areas too, which are nice, but the question stands who will want to explore these. Last boss probably takes inspiration from Path of Exile, but in a bad way, with degen pools that stay for the whole battle and are spammed over the arena making it annoying to engage with the fight with a melee character.
Now for the most controversial - you can ONLY play this in the legendary difficulty and ONLY once you defeat Hades, but ideally also Surtr (Ragnarök DLC). You are able to start with a legendary character but with no gear so they give you a "full set" of unique items. You cannot complete it though because some weapons cannot be used together. So while technically playable I cannot imagine starting off like this.
There are some crashes to desktop, buggy foliage, quest issues and your character getting stuck in terrain. All of this is even enhanced when in a party so it is very multiplayer unfriendly. Which is ironic because the DLC came together in parallel with moving away to Epic Games servers. And you could not opt-out of an agreement with them at launch. Luckily it was later made possible to launch without this cross-play.
TL;DR - If you want the new mastery and the quality of life additions then maybe on sale this is an okay purchase. But honestly, for me, it feels like a huge grind to get to the content. Then the campaign itself is joyless and grindy. I did not have fun with this one and thus cannot recommend it...
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