I surely enjoyed this game for a while, although being so unoriginal and built in such a badly-elaborated engine.
When I bought the game, I've started to play it with care, talking to everyone in the Helos village (the first city in the game), killing all the monsters and picking up all items. Naturally I didn't forget to look the world, the well-rendered water and so. Then, this was my first impression: ''finally a great and innovative hack 'n slack game, with a ground-breaking storyline and a lot of nice mythological places. Indeed there're innumerous beautiful places in Titan Quest like caves, ruins, pyramids, swamps etc., but the game fails to be original, since it's just too similar to Diablo II.
Here goes some the copied stuff from Blizzard's game: 1. Portals to travel between long distances; 2. If you die, you'll lose experience and gold; 3. You cannot save the game and load it from a file, since all things you do in Titan Quest is saved in your character file, therefore not allowing you to load the progress before doing something wrong; 4. Three regular acts featuring one boss, a Telkine, at the end, and a forth act with the final encounter; 5. The character development is very familiar, except to the points that you need to spend in the Mastery to improve the higher skills, but that's it. There are even more things that you can compare with Diablo II.
But the game has also some shining concepts: 1. The graphics are as amazing as the artistic job is. Everything looks awesome and realistic: water, forests, cities, monsters, places (ruins, temples, pyramids etc), weapons and so. The sound is also great, sometimes the voice and music fails, but it isn't a serious problem. Sometimes you'll face mythological creatures, such as giants, gorgons, minotaurs and even the Manticore. All of them have special abilities and specifics strategies to be defeated; 2. The player, at the start screen, chooses a genre for their hero and the game begins. When you reach level 2 of character (you earn experience by killing monsters and accomplishing missions), you can choose one of the eight Masteries in the game. Masteries can be selected to create a spell-caster, a fighter, a ranged warrior, a rogue etc. When you reach level 8, you can choose the last mastery, mixing the powers between them. This is a very nice idea and offers a great replay value; 3. The multiplayer is well done; the problem is that you cannot play in Player vs. Player, only in cooperative. Playing with allies is pretty cool, but it has some sync problems until you apply the patches; 4. I spent about 15 hours to finish Titan Quest, completing all the quests in the campaign. As in Diablo II, you may replay the game in higher difficult levels: Epic and Legend. The game offers a good challenge in all difficulties.
However there're some problems as well, despite the lack of originality: 1. The storyline is poor: a telkine wants to release a titan from its chains. You, as the hero, must stop. But you're late, the titan is released and you must confront him. You kill the huge beast, and that's all. Where're those characters who the historians in the towns had spoken about? Herakles (or Hercules), Zeus, Prometheus, Typhon, Echidna...? You'll find some items that have some of those names, but you'll never face a god or something. The mythological theme offers so many great stories, so a game based on it cannot have such a simplistic and uninspired one; 2. Now, the worse: the engine is really flawed; you'll experience choppy performance all the time. For example, when the night comes, the game becomes very slow for no apparent reason. The slow down also occurs when you approach a tree or enter in a cave, where the frames per second become incredibly unstable. The last patch (so far v1.15) will not correct the issue, and we are still waiting a patch to improve the slow performance. Really bad, since you buy a game and need to wait months for a patch to make it ''more playable''.
To finish, what makes me so disappointed really was the lack of originality by the developers. Nonetheless, if you liked Diablo II I'm sure you'll find something to enjoy in Titan Quest, at least if you can overlook its technical problems. If something shines in this game, it's definitely the good action sequences in this great-looking mythological world.