A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with a good friend of mine regarding the originality in today’s games. Or better said, about the fact that today’s titles simply fail to impress or make us go “Wow” like the ones from the 90’s used to do. Although I can’t say I’m a big fan of clones, regardless of their genre, personally I prefer something “borrowed” right than something original and broken. I prefer a standard interface that gets the job done instead of glowing orbs that you don’t have a clue what they do even after you’ve read the manual and gone through the tutorial. The same goes for gameplay. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. This was the philosophy of Iron Lore studios, founded by Age of Empires co-creator Brian Sullivan, when they started working on Titan Quest. Considering the fact that since Diablo 2 only Sacred and the Dungeon Siege games have been the only remarkable releases of the hack and slash sub-genre, Brian Sullivan and co decided to go with an already proven formula, bringing some refinements and tweaks to it to make it more interesting.

     Considering the fame of Diablo 2, comparing Titan Quest with Blizzard’s hack and slash is inevitable and there will be plenty of people who will say that TQ is nothing more than Diablo 2 with a different background. And for the most part, they’d be right. But you know what? At least from my point of view, this isn’t an issue at all. In Diablo 2 your task was to follow Beelzebub into the fiery depths of Hell and put his reign to an end. In Titan Quest you’ll have to go toe to toe with the Titans, gods before the Gods of Olympus, who have now escaped their eternal prison and are seeking revenge on Zeus and the other immortals for imprisoning them. Even though the story isn’t considered the most important aspect of a hack and slash, Iron Lore decided that a mediocre storyline simply won’t do for their game so they enrolled the services of Randall Wallace, screenwriter for movies such as Braveheart and Pearl Harbor. And although the story is clearly above average, the characters that you’ll meet in the game aren’t so well fleshed out as I would have liked, which is a real shame. Yes, it may be a hack and slash, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a little substance to it.

     Another gripe is that barring the intro there are no cinematic moments, pre-rendered or created with the game engine. There just isn’t anything that will create and support that epic feel the designers were hoping for, which is a shame. Nevertheless, the voice acting is surprisingly convincing, considering that all the NPC’s stories or monologues are spoken – your character doesn’t say a damn thing in the whole game by the way, which could very well make him the ancestor of Gordon Freeman.