Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another informative edition of Professor Meechie's Irregular Rambling About Video Games.
Titan Quest is frickin' awesome. Think of everything that changed between
Diablo II and
Diablo III. This game put all those ideas out there. Nicer loot, too. My favourite value to see attatched to something has to be "Lower all requirements by #%". Makes that axe designed for a 200-Strength bruiser usable by a 120-Strength roguish type.
TQ's socketing equivalent is easier too - monsters have a chance to drop certain elements, combine those elements to increase their strength, embed them into items when you're happy. No faffing about with crafters. Simple. It's all Greek mythology, so you can find pieces of Hermes's sandal leather or Prometheus's torchwood.
It looks ruddy nice, too, and I personally prefer the cleaner look over
DIII's gloom. The gameplay? Hack, slash, loot, level up. Interestingly, the levelling curve is more of a straight gradient, so you level up at pretty much the same rate all the way through the game, which I like. Again: Flexibility and accessibility.
After picking one of
the 9 classes, which are all fairly distinct, you can either stick with that one or pick a second at Level 8, making 28 or so combinations. Naturally, there's massive potential for variety inside those classes - you get 3 skill points every level, and most skills max out between 6 and 12, making powering up your basic skills as viable a tactic as reaching upwards for the big ones. Add another class to that and you've basically got a lazy way to double your game's character customisation.
Personally, though the skill tree has 6 (I think) levels, I've barely looked above the second. I found a poisoned spider leg that counts as a cutlass, so I ignored crowd control and decided I just want to hit as much angry monster with it as possible. Well, I went for a "Diviner" Spirit/Dream cross-class. I thought it would be a funky, slow, debuffing spellcaster type shindig. I was wrong.
I just click everything, as fast as I can. Turns out "Spirit" means "Necromancy" or "Making things die", and "Dream" actually meant "Psionics" or "Making things explode into wobbly purple distortion effects". So I sunk all my points into the bottom rungs of that skill ladder; on the Spirit front I now constantly radiate a cloud of death that weakens things and slowly kills them, an accelerated-aging field that corrodes their weapons and armour, and can suck the life directly from things if I get bored; while on the "Dream" front I have a double-damage "Punch/Big punch/Exploding punch" combo that Phylum would probably recognise (and also has a hilarious tendency to blast ragdolls over the level boundaries, treating me to the sight of corpses tumbling egregiously down the
outside of cave interiors), and some kind of mental skulduggery that doubles all my physical, life-draining and electrical damage.
Seriously, what all that has to do with dreams is not well explained. I think I'm supposed to not just be punching their body, but also punching their MIND, like it's the fucking Matrix or something.
So, yeah: Butcher your way through the world of classical legend with interesting powers, a mythological (i.e. legitimately stupid) story and wacky ragdoll physics.
£9.99 on Steam. So is the expansion. If you buy them together, you get £9.99 off. Lolwut in other words the expansion pack is free.
It has a demo too (an increasingly rare sight), so knock yourself out.