Titan Quest

I have been playing this game since it came out in 2006, before even Immortal Throne was announced. I was 9, and had to share the computer with my mom and younger brother.
Let me tell you, this game is STILL AMAZING. Yeah, the engine has hiccups, but I'm amazed it still runs on newer machines. My whole family played this game RELIGIOUSLY, and when Immortal Throne was released, we bought it immediately and played it for years. It brought my family together during some of our most stressful times, to be honest.
Since then, seeing that it has STILL been updated and added on to? That makes me so very happy. I never thought I'd see people getting to experience just how amazing this game is, let alone get to see new classes and content added on.
If you're looking for a technical review, here it is:
You'll have to mess with settings to keep it from crashing or developing huge glitches. It's an 18 year old game, what do you expect?
Gameplay is a lot like other ARPG's, especially with the class-mixing system and skill point allocation. It's not super "innovative" if you've played other ARPGs. But you have lots of story, rich lore, and gameplay time.
Performance? Hypothetically speaking, if one were to steal a computer from your local high school (that probably is still running Windows XP), you could run this game just fine with it. It takes next to nothing to run the game. It runs on 1 singular cpu core if that tells you anything, and (unless you mod it) doesn't even approach using 4gb of RAM. doesn't matter what video card you have either. your CPU could have integrated graphics and this game wouldn't skip a beat.
Please give this game some patience, and love. Iron Lore and THQ Nordic deserve tons of respect and love for not only bringing this game to Steam and every other console, but updating the game and adding DLC well over a decade later for the players who loved this game before and continue to love it now. I feel like a happy kid again being able to play this game. And as long as the developers give this kind of love to the next iteration, I'm hoping that one will be played decades from now as well, maybe even by my kids.
I'm very definitely biased, don't get me wrong. But I'm sure you'll like this game and I hope you keep it alive.

This is perhaps one of the best ARPGs I've ever played. Just to give some history, I've Played Diablo 2, 3 & 4, Torchlight 1 & 2, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing 1, Grim Dawn, and Path of Exile. This one is right up there with Diablo 2 and Path of Exile. Actually, it's better than that IMO because of the quality of life improvements and my personal pet peeves which this game doesn't trigger in the slightest.

This game isn't tedious, which means no back tracking unless you're really trying to farm a specific type of mob. Respawn points don't take long to get to, which means when you quit and mobs respawn, you don't have to run through them to get to where you want to go because you'll be right there. You aren't wandering around a zone for hours in repetitive terrain trying to get somewhere specific which is helpful if you have to quit the game in a hurry.

Titan Quest won't overload you. Each area has about 2 optional quests that you won't have to go out of your way for to complete. Usually, you'll complete them easy with map exploration or on the way to your next objective. Speaking of exploring, so far the entire map has been seamless (other than getting on a boat and traveling to a new area). No loading screens when entering a dungeon, settlement, etc. As I mentioned before, unless you quit and reload, monsters stay dead.

The skill trees for each class choice are unique, engaging, and executed well. You won't find them in any ARPG you've played before. Not to mention there are a lot of builds that work well with one another.

Now let's talk about the negatives as compared to other ARPS: Well, there really aren't that many. You can make the argument that the game play doesn't feel fresh and the graphics aren't on par with other games of this genre, which is fair considering the date when Titan Quest was first released. With that said, if you still enjoy Diablo 2, you'll enjoy this game as it improves upon it in so many ways. Just to be clear, most of the ARPGS I've played are more recent than this, yet there is a reason I'm playing Titan Quest and not the other games I've mentioned.

The only real negative I have for this game is the dialogue. For whatever reason, the written dialogue scrolls faster than the voice acting which annoys me. If that's where you draw the line, then oh my god don't play this game, it will end you!

Titan Quest does the genre justice. If you enjoy ARPGS, this is a must play, a hidden gem even as it's often overshadowed by the Diablo franchise and Path of Exile. I was going to wait until I beat it to leave a review, but the first 15 hours has been so fun, I couldn't help myself. This game is worth your money regardless of whether or not it's on sale.

This is the best game in it's class IMO! Very good gameplay loop with areas and enemies that are diverse. I love the loot system (think old school Diablo 2) where rares and mythics feel like rares and mythics. When you find a good piece of loot it feels important and exciting. Love the ragdoll physics on enemies when you become OP! Love that drop what they are using or trinkets can only drop from their perspective enemy (Turtle shells only drop from turtles). Even up to 2024 the grind and game building stands up to the big guys like D4. Great mastery system with tons of options. I Can't stress enough to give this one a go over the competition. I've been playing it since release and they have been releasing expansions up into 2021! I have purchased it 3 or 4 times over (Consoles, Anniversary editions Etc) and am very excited for TQ2!

Outstanding game. Highly recommended. I somehow skipped this game in favor of D2, D3, and PoE over the past 20+ years. TQ has an amazing story progression and side adventuring. Graphics are beautiful. Soundtrack is a masterpiece. Voice acting is reference quality. Very challenging at times. Looking forward to getting the expansion packs in the near future.

This was the game that got me into RPG. If you are a fan of mythology, Diablo or Sacred series, then this will be to your enjoyment too. The developers have released a lot of extra content since Immortal Throne so there is plenty to do for new and returning players. Graphics has always looked good, gameplay has been improved and has more masteries to pick from. I don't think there is another game out there with as much variety in all respects as this game (enemy, locations, armour, weapons etc). One of my all time favourites for good reason.

Classic. Not the greatest, but one of its kind. Grim dawn is so much better in game play, but the atmosphere in this game touch me more.

Well... there would be lots of comparison to Grim Dawn, because of a number of reasons.
Will start with audio as easiest one to finish I guess. It's very uneven - sound of hits and skills is almost non-existent which is one of reasons why combat feels floaty. Music mostly have no impact, pretty much not noticeable, however, some tracks in DLCs, especially Ragnarok are quite a blast.
Storyline is okay for base game, better in Ragnarok and Eternal Ember, but the way it's presented is so boorish.. I mean, it's definitely not a recent release, but they did make anniversary edition and there were dlcs - could have made some time to bring life to just bland squares with floating times new roman or whatever that font is called. Even indies with white pixelated bubbles with text provide more soul and feelings.
Graphics are dated, which is no surprise, engine looks about same as Grim Dawn, but quite a bit less stylish. Design of creatures though is quite faithful to myths and legends and gear being location appropriate is a nice touch. You got your Greece, Egypt and Orient styles plus kinda a bit infernally looking Hades stuff. DLCs once again got an upper hand with North and a bunch of various sets from Eternal Embers (Chinese\Egyptian what I recall). Can't remember if I got even smth worthy in Atlantis dlc, so not sure what gear from there even looks like. Level design is 50\50, half of locations are good (they did quite interesting thing with minotaur labyrinth), another half is quite boring and fact that your character movement is fairly slow and distance between few portals game have is substantial does not help. On separate note - settlement\city design in base game compared to dlcs was quite the big gap. Some extra small camps with vendors or tiniest available part of big cities like Athens, Delphi, Memphis would make you think ancient world had no more than 100 ppl living together anywhere. Ragnarok and Eternal Embers on the other hand... Heuneburg, Pingyang, Thebes look like carefully crafted museum miniatures, with last two also being impressively sized, just incredible job done there.
And now the gameplay... lots of things are almost exactly like in Grim Dawn - talents, attributes, classes, static maps, desire to give gear rarity colour that differs from most other games. But despite it all being practically same, it's somehow worse, except for rarity colours - that decision is still as confusing as in other game. Combat is probably the worst offender among all things - it's so floaty and slow... unlike games like Diablo, Torchlight, WoW, where skills and actions are performed immediately, if they don't have cast time, so it's very action oriented and responsive, Grim Dawn has slight delay, which makes it slightly slower if you will. But in Titan Quest it's quite significant, what's worse, even if you did wait your time and used skill with appropriate delay and see visuals of skill, if you quickly pressed it again before all animations finished - it might not have been executed and did no impact on the world - so no dmg or no heal. There were few crashes while going through game normally, but trying to skip as much as possible and run past enemies to get to bosses faster during next several playthroughts had it freezing and crashing quite regularly. It's also possible to get stuck - mostly when opening chest or door and more often than not only way to get out is to teleport to nearest portal and run again, since returning to same position would just get you stuck there again. If you'd like to get all achievements for finishing game with every class and do not feel like playing through exactly same maps again a lot of times - use save scumming. It's not that easy, but possible to get to end fight with only one class chosen - there is even achievement for finishing with one, so when you get to last savepoint - copy save folder somewhere, kill boss, replace save folder and you'd appear at last save point with still only one class chosen. So just get necessary class, kill boss and repeat same for others.
So in conclusion - gameplaywise it's inferior to Grim Dawn, if you want to play both better start with Titan Quest to not find it insufferable after way more polished title. Story and world design are probably strong points of the game and deserve attention, especially dlcs. It was very good ARPG for its time, however, time does not wait for anyone and it is quite aged now.