Titan Quest is a Diablo 2 style game with gorgeously-rendered mostly-3d graphics (ie: everything’s 3d, but you can’t rotate the view) and a physics engine, set in ancient Greece. You choose male/female, then go right into the game and start stabbing things. After killing a whole bunch of weak monsters you get your first level-up. Once you level up you choose your first specialty and start putting points into your speciality skill trees. You get Earth, Storm, Warfare, Spirit, Defense, Nature, Hunting & Rogue specialties. You choose your second specialty at level 8, and the two specialties combine to give you your “class” (kind of).

Specialties:
Storm gives you lightning & cold powers (freezing enemies, slowing them, zapping people)
Earth gives you fire & earth powers (fireballs, inbuing your shots/weapons with fire, earth elementals)
Warfare gives you your attacking prowess as a warrior, hitting harder, dual-wielding, etc.
Spirit looks to be necromancy, leeching health, control of undead, etc
Defense is defending stuff (duh), to do with shield powers, stunning with maces, etc
Nature is druidic magic, I think
Hunting is ranger-type ranged weapon specialisation
Rogue is thievery and backstabbing and poisons

Like I said earlier, you take the second specialty at level 8 and it gives you your “class”. So Storm & Earth combine to make an Elementalist, Warfare & Defense combine to make a Warrior, Rogue & Warfare combine to make an Assassin. That kind of thing. You don’t have to take a second if you don’t want to, you can always just pump your skill points into the one speciality and stay a specialist in the one thing. For example, Storm makes you a Stormcaller, and Earth a Pyromancer.

The way they’ve implemented the skill trees is kind of strange. You get 3 skillpoints each time you level, and sometimes as a reward for completing quests. You use these to add points to skills in the specialty skill trees, but before you can put points into something you need to actually put points into the skill tree itself. It is kind of hard to explain, but for both of your two skills there is a meter with notches at 1, 4, 10, (can’t remember the rest). At 1 point invested you open up the first few skills. Then after you’ve played with those for a bit if you invest 3 more points into the meter you’ll open up the next tier, then 6 to the next after that, etc. Of everything in the game I think that that is my least favourite. Generally games implement skill trees in such a fashion that you need to have a certain amount of points invested in certain things before you can proceed higher instead of wasting points on a meter that unlocks the higher skills. I am willing to overlook this though, because the rest of the game kicks 10 different colours of ass.

I started up a Pyromancer and was immediately impressed by the amount of damage I was doing. Sustainable damage, mind you, none of that “burning mana like crazy then running away for a bit” nonsense. I put my points into an enchantment that imbued my attacks with fire and increased the amount of damage that fire staves do. I started out using a bow with flaming arrows, but quickly dropped that in favour of a fire staff (ie: a staff that shoots fireballs). As I was busy tearing through things I levelled a couple times and in a move that I will forever hail as one of the best moments in my gaming life put some points into a skill called Volcanic Orb.

Let me tell you what Volcanic Orb says it does. It says “Sends an orb of fire and brimstone, exploding on impact and dealing both physical and fire damage to opponents in a small radius”. That orb needs to hire itself an agent, because it is vastly underselling itself. What it actually does is attempt to blow everything in the immediate vicinity about 20 ft into the air in a hilarious fashion. The first time I used it was on a couple of really fat wild boars, so they kind of just jumped up a bit and landed nearby. It was an “oh shit!” moment, but the real fun came when I got to the relatively light skeletons in the nearby graveyard. When I lobbed an orb at a bunch of skeletal archers it launched them so high that they flew off the top of my screen. Bits of skeleton rained down all over the place. It was goddamn awesome. I’ve since taken to using it as my offhand weapon of choice. Fireball, fireball, fireball, orb. It has a cooldown & it takes some mana to cast, but it is the grenade to my staff’s m-16 round. Lobbing fire orbs at enemies and watching them fly into the air when the orb explodes is something that never gets old.

What else is pretty entertaining is the way they have implemented an effect called “life-leech”. It’s your pretty standard necromantic spell really, draining the life of your opponents into yourself over time. I can’t cast it as a Pyro/Elementalist (regretting picking up Storm powers), but my current staff has a nice life-leech effect on it. As a result, whenever I shoot something it takes the initial flame hit, then its life is slowly drained a little more as it approaches. This is pretty funny, because you get scenes like shooting three goatmen one after another and having them run towards me only to die after a couple of steps later. The life-leech death animation isn’t a “HUALGLHL” animation like the other violent methods I employ, it’s more of a narcoleptic “dropping your weapon and falling over halfway through doing whatever it was you were doing” thing. So yeah: fireball fireball fireball, three goats running towards me suddenly just kind of fall over. Awesome.

At this point I am a couple of hours into the game, but I’m thinking that I may restart a couple of times with different specialities to check them out. I have a feeling I made a mistake selecting Storm as my second specialty, as it doesn’t feel worth it at the moment. The Earth/Spirit combo probably would have suited me better, what with the leeching and the falling and the laughing ghm-hay mw-hey. At the moment though it seems like I would quite happily start the game over, because I had so much fun getting to the point I am at right now that it doesn’t seem like it’d be anything but enjoyable to do it all over again.