If you’re a hardcore Diablo 2 fan and have been milking the game’s patches for replayability, you might wanna check out Titan Quest. Simply put, it’s a mighty Diablo clone. The game is credited largely to Brian Sullivan, co-creator of Age of Empires. Now we know why the game is largely based on Greek and Egyptian historical mythology rather than the tried-and-true fantasy settings.

You start as a warrior of Sparta and that’s it. The design difference at this stage is that you don’t have to pick a class, you customize your character through skill point allocation in the different skill trees that are available. There are Warfare, Defense, Nature, a set for Ice/Lightning magic, a set for Fire/Earth magic, to name a few. You can only choose two major ones in the game so it’s entirely possible to have a Fire-magic-wielding warrior that can summon a pack of wolves. Obviously, this bumps up replayability in huge degrees.

As mentioned before, gameplay = Diablo. The difference here is that everything is 3D – you romp through forests, caves and ancentral tombs in eye-catching hi-poly splendor. What’s fun to watch is when your character makes a critical hit and you literally send the enemy flying several feet up on the screen. Gold and items both normal and magical spring forth from decapitated enemies, and everything is readily identifiable. No all-knowing, high-Lore town shaman to consult here.

(Holy tiger, is this the Great Wall of China?)
After going through 8 character levels, the enemies get more challenging (aura-equipped and magic-users) and areas get more interesting. As you play on, accept and finish more quests, you know that items will get better and enemies will get tougher and your character will look more vicious than ever before. And perhaps that’s the shortcoming of all hack-and-slash games – things will start to get boring and you’ll find yourself playing through the game to learn what the story is all about.

Nevertheless, at the time of large-world RPGs like Oblivion and traditional party-based dungeon crawlers like Neverwinter Nights 2, Titan Quest will warm the heart of that PC warrior who just wants to hack at the closest arachnid soldier and grab that fallen armor.