With the recent release of Starcraft II I think quite a few people are turning a wishful eye towards the upcoming (but unscheduled) release of Diablo III. If you're one of these people, twitching for the critter-crushing loot-grabbing skill-unlocking goodness that we remember, then do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Titan Quest in the meanwhile. You should be able to pick up a gold edition (including the expansion pack Immortal Throne) for like 20$ which is well worth it.
Titan Quest is a third person RPG set in (mostly) Greek mythology. The controls are very simple - click to move, click to attack, big obvious keys for spells & abilities, etc. You start as a random peasant with a lot of nothing, but as is frequently the case in such games, your foes have been conveniently laid out in order from weakest creature in the entire land to strongest, in a nice 'follow here' pattern starting at your feet.
It has a pretty typical inventory system with body locations to drop equipment onto and a backpack for carrying spare loot, healing potions, and the like. The items are decent but not amazing, with some minor random modifiers added to magic items and different levels of rareness for better gear. The rarer the item, the more cool bonuses it has tacked onto it. There's also a nice collection of charms that can be assembled and attached to items, letting you customize their bonuses slightly to your own preferences. These will vary a bit depending on what sort of character you build. I'm a big fan of lifesteal since healing all the time while you kill stuff seems like a better health tip than eating vegetables regularly.
Once you've gained a couple levels you'll get the option to choose your first Mastery. This is your class selection. You'll end up getting two classes over the course of the game so choose carefully. Each class has an associated skill tree with abilities to match. Think about how two of those are going to go together, since the two will interact and the combinations can be pretty fun. Combine spirit magic (necromancy) with warfare and you get a life draining melee combatant with undead minions. Hunting and storm yields a bow-wielding lightning mage. Nature and rogue combine to give you a trap-laying sneak with wolves and healing at his call. With 8 masteries (or 9 if you have the expansion) there are a lot of fun combinations to try out, and you'll probably end up playing a couple different characters at some point just to do so.
Core gameplay is decent but a bit repetitive. The monster AI is just proximity triggered so its not going to surprise you by doing anything interesting. Monsters tend to be clustered in little packs at regular intervals so you can fight one group, move up, fight the next. Generally every level is laid out in one long path so you just move forward fighting group after group until you reach the next checkpoint / town / guy in a cart / whatever.
It does spice things up a bit once in a while with a serious boss monster though. These are notably tougher, have some cool spell powers of their own, and can actually be a reasonable challenge, particularly if you've over-specialized a bit too far. All your damage revolves around your pets? Whoops, this guy eats pets for breakfast. Entirely dependent upon your life-drain to stay up? Sorry, undead are immune to lifedrain and here's a BIG one. You get the idea. If you get stuck you can always pull back and level up a bit, fill your pack with healing potions, and try again. But when you've been coasting through the normal waves like they were butter for a while it comes as a bit of a surprise to hit something that's actually challenging for a change.
I should say more about pets. Quite a few masteries have a pet or two (or three) at their disposal. These are monsters that follow you around and lend a hand. Pets are fun! They come in a variety of flavors depending on the mastery and almost all of them are really enjoyable to have around. Nature, for example, gets a couple wolves that patrol around you, sweeping the little critters you might not even have noticed before you see your wolves busy eating them. Earth gets a big elemental that stomps around and tanks for you. Spirit has a friendly lich that happily life drains away next to you the whole time. You get the idea. There's several more, and almost all of them are fun, with perhaps the single exception of the Wisp. Storm has a floating electric zapper which I excitedly saved up to unlock. At last I had the points needed and finally summoned him, only to discover that he was a total dud. The Wisp is a close range defender that sits on you and only attack things that are super close by. Unfortunately, its cast by a class that defaults to long-ranged attacking so your Wisp ends up being a pointless speck that hides next to you and does nothing. *Shakes fist* Why couldn't you be a useful pet?
Anyways, there's definitely fun to be had here. You can play it multiplayer just fine. It scales the monsters up a bit for multiplayer play so you still make comparable progress to single-player. Make sure to play completely different masteries so you won't be competing for loot. It sucks to all want the same rare item of coolness when you know you won't see another one like it anytime soon.
If you've got the Diablo itch right now and need a way to scratch it, pick up a copy of Titan Quest today. It is a solid, enjoyable game that does a good job of staying true to its genre while providing enough unique additions to make it worth a run through.
Titan Quest
Rating: 8.2
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