Titan Quest is originally a 20-year-old game (2006) with some distance from the original Diablo (1996). It’s quite a trip down memory lane thinking about what else released in 2006: Neverwinter Nights 2, FFXII, and on the movie side Casino Royale, Pirates 2, X-Men 3. A couple of achievements reference the animated Disney Mulan and The Scorpion King (mercifully lost to time). Titan Quest’s lineage of dual-classing and components (items that attach to equipment and modify them) is very clear in Grim Dawn, released a decade later (2016) just before Titan Quest received its own Anniversary Edition (2016).
Unsurprisingly, Titan Quest has dated graphics, but as indicated by the existence of Grim Dawn, its game systems are pretty solid. (Here there are no Devotion Constellations and Recipes aren’t something you learn, they’re ingredients in the formula.) However I played the entire game without an artifact; this system wasn’t explained well and I never seemed to find the ingredients for any recipe.
The distinctive aspect of Titan Quest is its bright quasi-historical/mythological settings - this isn’t about grimdark demon-plagued medieval countryside, or post-apocalyptic steampunk, this is the sunny Mediterranean, sunnier Egypt, the Silk Road, and not sunny Northern Europe (I didn’t play Eternal Embers). There’s a bit of a kick talking to ancient historical and mythological NPCs, and fighting dinosaurs and Neanderthals in regions with ancient names for Tibet and Iran. The Greek setting was relatively fresh (though that dropped off returning to it multiple times later), I did not enjoy Egypt, the mandatory ARPG desert second act (please stop copying Diablo 2, it’s been over a quarter of a century), and the journeys through the Silk Road, and Celtic settlements in modern Germany to Scandinavia were fun. The voice acting is pretty bad, with lots of “pretend old man” and “pretend old man with fake accent”.
On the actual gameplay, there were several factors that hurt the pacing of the game quite badly. The maps were far too large and finicky (running down narrow staircases in dungeons was particularly bad), and without objective markers, finding your destination was frequently a chore, repeated many, many times across the 6-act campaign. There are far too many multi-level dungeons, and huge wilderness areas, and the enormous Labyrinth where the minimap didn’t match the actual terrain was a particular nadir.
There are waypoints only in major cities; the rebirth fountains in between are poor substitutes. Through a combination of attack-speed, and damage/health ratios, enemies became tedious to exterminate, many of them automatically moved just in time to dodge my dash-strike skill. I ran through many, many maps, avoiding monsters, occasionally turning around to AoE the gathered groups that were still following me. Then there was the irritating tendency for enemies to aggro from offscreen long after a fight while I was going through my inventory. Early in the game, enemy champions and certain bosses were far too strong (one boss absorbed my top two damage types) and stalled out my progress.
I had frequent freezes and a few crashes on my machine, even after making all the recommended changes to fix them. Occasionally during combat my character froze or stopped receiving input (maybe I got stunned but this wasn’t clear), and especially in later maps overhanging foliage or tall foreground terrain obscured enemies and fights behind them. I had to restart a couple of times after teleporting inside walls, and there were a couple of bugs where quests (including main quests) weren’t ticked off correctly.
Overall Titan Quest is better appreciated as a piece of history in the ARPG genre, and an ARPG with a less common tone and setting. Grim Dawn uses the same mechanics within a more polished game.
