A Diablo 3 "Tide-You-Over"
The graphics are really cool looking. Grass and plants bend with your characters movements while walking through fields. It really makes the game look more life like. Everything in the game has it's own ragdoll effect, which was pretty cool. For instance, you'd open a chest and behold a wonderful treasure, only to have it bounce about off of each other while hitting the ground. Monsters will fall off sides of cliffs after collapsing on the ground. The shaders in the game are really good and help present the game in the most clear and crisp colors you can imagine. Well, for that time period at least. The music in the game is well done. They even have an option to tune the music off and have it appear only on certain events, such as a boss battle or entering a new town. I really liked that option, because typically, I turn off music in games. The EAX support in the game brings out some fantastic sounding monster screams, especially while in a dungeon. However, some of the sounds do seem a little recycled. I wish they had more variety for when items dropped. Speaking of which, that's a really cool feature in the game. Whatever a monster is holding, you can pick up after you've killed it. All of their items will drop.
They implemented some jewel crafting into the game, giving a more custom fit to your items. The only thing that could have made the jewel crafting better is making them drop less often, and make it where some jewels can be applied into blue items or higher. One of the things you'll get sick of is the item drop rate. Enough of the yellow items, already! (Yellow isn't rare at all). It just gets annoying when you're looking for items and a million yellow and white things are appearing while you hold down the Item List key. Multi player is perfect as far as just jumping into a game. It's like the pros have done before in Diablo and Dungeon Siege. They even threw in some PvP, which is the one thing Dungeon Siege 2 was missing. One thing I really enjoyed was the increase of difficulty whenever someone joins your game. The game is pretty easy by itself so having this is almost a must. That's one of the biggest problems I have with this game is the difficulty. The game starts out sorta hard, but as you get past the first act, you'll end up walking through the game, or at least I did. My friend was playing at different times and said he was having a problem fighting off some of the bosses alone. I guess I just had too good of items to play through, because I really didn't have a problem. That is until the very end. The last boss is probably the hardest boss I've ever fought. The battle reminded me of a game called Painkiller, a first person shooter set up like old school DOOM or Serious Sam. One of the bosses you fight in Painkiller is almost 100x bigger than you and is really dang hard. This last boss in Titan Quest, is sorta like that, only I couldn't beat him alone. I had to wait for some people to join in my game so they could help.
A few minor glitches in the game hold it back from making it a near-perfect experience. The first problem you'll encounter is the fighting system. Sometimes when fighting a mob, you'll notice no one is dying. Why is that? Because your guy isn't close enough to hit the character. It seems to happen a lot more at the end of the game, as your guy just stands there and hacks away at nothing while taking a mighty beating. The other glitch is the invisible wall area on the 3rd act, in the forest at the end. I kept getting stuck on nothing and had to find my way around it a lot. Pretty easy thing they could have worked out, at least through a patch by now.
The only thing that could have made this game better is for them to do what Dungeon Siege 2 does and store your characters on a GameSpy server. That would have been nice, but oh well. Overall, it's a really good game and should be purchased if you're a real fan of the hack-n-slash genre. Heck, we can use all we can until Diablo 3 comes out.
Verdict: Buy