Teaming up adds a much-needed second level to the action, and really allows the various classes to shine together. Similarly to Diablo 3, the multiplayer sees you drop in and out of your friends’ adventures to help one another through the story. As in all ARPGs, getting to know and understand your chosen class is crucial, especially when you foray into the multiplayer mode. While there aren’t many screen-filling spell effects, some of the attacks do look quite impressive. The translation from mouse and keyboard to controller is seamless, as a comprehensive Ability wheel allows you to easily select between 8 different attacks or buffs at any given moment (once they’re unlocked, of course). Standard choices like Hunter, Rogue or Warrior are easy to fathom, but when you have magical classes called Nature, Storm and Dream it becomes a bit trickier.Īs you earn XP and level up, you’ll unlock skill points that you can either spend on special abilities or bank to increase various attributes. There’s a bit more to it than you might realise at first, and the various classes, here called “Masteries”, may confuse you at a glance. Once you begin to level up it gets better, but Titan Quest’s deep character progression system isn’t immediately user-friendly. The combat is quite clunky, almost perfunctory, and not all that dazzling.
Although, the flaws are a serious caveat.įor a start, it feels pretty slow. Once you stop comparing the two and judging TQ by its own merits, you realise it’s an enjoyable, compelling adventure, despite its flaws. Which is to be expected, given the kind of money and pedigree Blizzard has to back it up. Trekking from Greece through Egypt and as far as China’s legendary Silk Road, you’ll face a plethora of mythological monsters all given a lick of high fantasy flair.Īt a basic level, it’s all very “Diablo”, but if I’m honest, Titan Quest (at least this edition) falls some way short of Blizzard’s most recent iteration. It soon transpires that the gods are not impressed with humanity, and one of them (or so you assume) has unleashed the Titans, ancient avatars of global destruction, and it falls to you and your knife and your tunic to put a stop to it.
If you’ve played an ARPG in this vein before, then you already know what’s coming and you’ll feel immediately at home in Helos. You soon find that they’re all over the village, along with aggressive wild boars and some really mean crows.
Armed only with a little knife and a tunic, off you go, to slaughter a bunch of goat-headed Satyrs tormenting a young fellow’s horse.
TORCHLIGHT II REVIEW IGN PC
Initially release on PC in 2006, it tells the story of an Ancient Greece beset by angry gods and overrun by all manner of mythological creatures.Īfter creating your character in a bare bones interface, you’re dropped straight into the town of Helos and told to head on down the road and fight off the invading nasties. But being a console gamer myself, I’d never come across Titan Quest, a similar hack ‘n’ slash RPG adventure from THQ Nordic. But Diablo is such a beloved beast (1 and 2 on PC 3 more-so on console), that it must be quite a daunting prospect for any developer to attempt to create something new or fresh in a genre Blizzard had a serious hand in defining.įor my money, the next best things is Torchlight, though contenders like Sacred II and Dungeon Hunter have made their own waves, too. I mean, no one moans about CoD-clones, do they, and there are certainly plenty of those. The thing about Blizzard’s seminal dungeon-crawling franchise is that it’s so feature rich that it’s hard to create something in the same genre without coming across as a cheap copy. The term “Diablo-clone” is used a lot in the games industry and not always in a positive way.
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