It’s been six long years since Diablo 2 held us in click-click-clicking thrall, biothaumaturgically fused to our seats by dint of divine imperative and protracted immersion, feeding on intravenously-ferried caffeine and other essential nutrients, as we dealt righteous slaughter unto the infernal hordes. Since then, we’ve shed wistful tears, hefted once-beloved set items and gazed upon the hollow hills of our beloved action-RPG realm, the teeming damned having departed with apparent finality.
There’ve been a few contenders to the crown, of course — most notably Sacred. Touted initially as “omg, like, it’s totally Diablo 3“, it arrived with glorious fanfare — only to depart with a muted trumpet and more bugs than a hypothetical B-grade movie entitled Attack of the 50-ft Bugs.
Now, from a somewhat unlikely brace of producers (the co-creator of Age of Empires, and the writer of Braveheart), we have -‒ finally -‒ a worthy claimant to Diablo‘s legacy. Tremble, ye famished masses, before the epic that is Titan Quest.
OK, so you’re some nobody in a skirt in some ancient Greek backwater. A few dialogues later, and it turns out that those mythological nasties, the Titans, are gnawing through the bars of their subterranean prison and causing all manner of earthly chaos — a most fortuitous corollary for the would-be hero, especially since it would appear that, quaking in their britches, Zeus and his squabbling brood have scuttled off to some far-flung place of safety, and abandoned mankind to its fate. Cue monster-bashing, looting, and giddy XP guzzling.
Titan Quest offers a delectable surfeit of no-nonsense hack n’ slash RPG fare, with some innovative garnishes to delight even the most jaded palate. There’s the requisite array of character classes (an impressive tally at 28, including the possible cross-class combinations), each sporting a ladder system of nifty skills and special abilities. Catering to the item hog in us all, there are thousands of generously-doled out, smartly-generated and eminently desirable items, including rare, enchantable, unique and set collectibles.
Beyond the relative safety (occasionally interminable and seemingly irrelevant townsfolk dialogue notwithstanding) of the towns, the landscape is blistered with all manner of beasties, magnanimously prepared to throw themselves at your ready weapons and give you their stuff.
A natty little touch is that foes will always leave behind whatever you saw them flailing about with, once you’ve sent them limping off to Charon’s Interexistential Ferry (One-Way Only. One Coin on the Each Eyeball, Please. No Chancers).
A marvellous and welcome innovation to the RPG genre is the physics engine gambolling about in this game. Score a critical hit, and you’ll be treated to the sight of your thoroughly trounced opponent haplessly flying across your screen. Your dutiful reviewer, in the interests of science and quality assessment, managed to banish some sort of weregoat to the top of a tree, to loll about in undignified testament to the delights of biospatial calculations.
While somewhat over half of the game takes place in Greece, excursions to Egypt and China round out the 50-odd hours of gameplay. The environments and terrains are varied, and boast aggressive fauna themed to the locale (including minotaurs and harpies in Greece, mummies in Egypt, and clay armies in China) in addition to the standard fantasy fodder (skeletons, zombies, animated behemoths of lava-dripping rock, and the omnipresent -‒ and indispensable — goatmen). The graphics are simply gorgeous, and the soundtrack dramatic but unobtrusive.
For the sake of maintaining some semblance of objectivity, it should be noted that this game has two flaws -‒ there’s no town stash, and no expansion has (yet) been announced. The latter is most assuredly the more dire.