Titan Quest is probably the best diablo clone in years, complete with seemingly causeless crashes.
You start off practically naked and with nothing but a rather pathetic knife - no skills whatsoever, and no defining class either. This is a little odd for any RPG, especially one of this variety. You usually at least get to pick a class.
In Titan Quest, you dont get to pick your class untill your first level up. Well, sort of. Once you level up, you can pick one of eight masteries, which will choose what special abilities you'll be able to play around with. At level 8, you're given the option of adding another mastery, but are not forced to - so you can either highly specialize your character towards one speciality, or pick up some of your favorite skills from two mastery groups. (If i remember correctly, the masteries are seperated into more or less Swords, Sheilds, Bows, Lighting/Ice, Earth/Fire, Death, Restoration, Nature)
There's plenty of loot afoot. So much so, in fact, it often gets much more aggrivating then in the genre staple Diablo. Basically every monster that has a sword, shield, helmet, whatever, drops it when he or she dies. This often creates such a mess your "show items" key cant even display the names of everything strewn about the ground, and after a while, you start to just mostly ignore the weapons and armor that fall down, and only pick up potions and gold.
The questing system is done almost exactly as you would expect. You progress through a mostly linear story, and on the way your given the option to do sidequests. Doing sidequests usually just gives you extra experience, so may not be worth the hassle, considering experience comes so easily in Titan Quest - whenever you load a game, all the bad guys come back.
One of my favorite features of the game is part of the inventory system. While the inventory is pretty much what you would expect - a series of squares that lets you move around items to store, when you hover the mouse over any item, instead of just putting that items stats up, it also shows you the stats of any item(s) of the same type you have equipped, so you can easily compare the two without frantically moving the mouse back and forth, a la Diablo.
And of course, we mustn't forget the purdy graphics. Suprisingly, the game manages to run rather smooth even on older systems, and on newer systems that can handle it in higher resolutions, the game can look stunning. In a wise move, the developers chose to disallow you from moving the camera around, so this avoids a lot of confusion that could otherwise be caused, especially in multiplayer games. (You can, though, zoom in and out fairly far.)
At the same time, however, i keep noticing that my avatar never seems to have any pants on. I mean, the graphics are great, but my avatar is supposed to be the coolest thing in the game, and its just not happening, because for some reason he just wont wear pants! (Seriously, the equipment screen lets you wear something for your head, arms, feet, torso, and two rings and a necklace. Not a single place for pants.) Some armors come down far enough to make it appear as thought you have some sort of pants on, but most dont, and if you ask me, it just looks silly.
Besides my minor gripe with the avatar not liking pants, the only other downside to Titan Quest is it crashes a lot, for seemingly no reason, especially in multiplayer. (Which is another thing that really reminds me of the first Diablo - lots of crashes for no reason.) New patches have been released to address some issues, but many people, including myself, are still having occasional problems. (When it was first released, crashes came seemingly every 15 minutes, now there down to once every 3 or 4 hours of gameplay.) In singleplayer, this isnt much of a problem, as its a clean crash to the desktop, and autosave seems to back up your character every minute or so, so you never really loose anything. In multiplayer, however, the crashes are much more frequent, and make it nearly unplayable in its current form.
Titan Quest is protected by SecuRom v7. This copy protection scheme installs a service that runs in the background of your computer, while the game is running. It basically refrains you from using CD Emulator programs. There seems to be no performance hit that this causes to the system, so long as your willing to turn off your emulation program if you have one to play the game. While a slight hassle, SecuRom 7 isnt as annoying as StarForce, so most users will be just fine and not see any problems. All in all, Titan Quest is a good game. Its not the Diablo-killer we've all been waiting for, but it is certainly a ton of fun to play. Once the developers patch the game a few more times and get multiplayer fully stable, this will certainly be a top contendor for LAN parties everywhere. If your a fan of hack and slashers like diablo, this is a very fun clone, that while it wont have the same impact on the genre as diablo did, it will certainly offer you as much fun if you let it.