Titans Quest: Immortal Quest Review

After seeing the mouth watering HD trailers of Diablo 3, I got to admit, my mouth has been watering for sometime for that game. I went and bought a new PC for that. Since then I have been playing allot of PC, old and new. A game that I have started sometime ago was Titan's Quest. That was around 3 years when I had my Athlon 170XP and fx geforece card. I was getting really crappy framerates on that POS, but I still went on. After doing so much overclocking, the PC friend and I ended up having to stop playing the game after thinking that I have reached the end. Trying this on the new PC, the resolution was a 1920 x 1200. Everything ON. For an old game, it looked gorgeous. Lighting, texture work and animation is really good for a game that old. The game hardly dropped one frame below 60 thoughout all the game. Sound is also very good, One of the dungeon tracks is very catchy, the sound effects make you feel like you are really out and about with birds, animals, waters, people crowds in markets and so on. The game excels in the sound department.The mechanics of the game are pretty good too. The fighting system is very easy to use, you get a mastery meny and an equipment/status one. Masteries are the most interesting part of this game. You get two choose 2/8. Example are Storm, Earth, Nature, Dream, etc... They give your warrior spells and powers that you can use as you gain skills from leveling up. As much as it is a great system, growing and improving it takes allot of time as you only get 3 skill points when you level up. And leveling up is not really a quick thing by all means. Another interesting thing in this game is the equipment. Swords, Axes, Staffs, Bows, Shields, enhancements, rings, amulets, armour, boots, and relics. You will spend most of your time in this game on equiping your warrior. After leveling up, you get to choose between strenghts, dexterity and intelligence in addition to health and magic energy. Choose wisely and different equipment need different attributes. Strenghts to wear big armour or hold big axes for example. Intellgence to use wizard staffs, dexterity to use bows, etc... The overall system is that good that you will be addicted. The more you play and kick baddies arses, the more goodies you will find, the more relics you will combine and the more fun you will get while you build artifacts, or enhance gear. The story is straight forward and linear, you are a titan, some roman god goes berserk and you need to stop him. Being a Muslim, stories about roman and greek mythologies do not really ring my bell. But I will not get into that much and turn this review intoa relgious critique. I found this story the only let down in this game. I only turned it on for the mastery and equipments and fighting, not for the story. The quests are ok. Motivation was also for experince and equipment, but the latter did not come from quests that much, you get your best gear from caves and fights and not even from merchants. merchants will get used more for selling not buying. Money is fun to get in the first couple of acts, but it gets really boring after as you see your money reaching 15,000,000 gold and you have really no use for it. The only use I found was restorting relics from enhanced gear or withdrawing skill points used on certain masteries. You will start get bored of money trust me. Other frustrations can come from having to start a birth fountain everytime you die. Yes you get to gain experience from recollection your tombstone, but it is so little you will hardly see your level bar move, its not motivating. I would rather reload where I died instead of this time wasting process. At some stages, I was about to give up. I even used a trainer at the end of this game as I really was about to leave the game and hit uninstall. It is that frustrating. Overall as the credits rolled, I felt a certain level of satisfaction, but it was not that huge. I was glad I was able to end this really unique game. Diablo 3, ready when you are.

GRAPHICS 8.5 Very good textures, animation and design
SOUND 9 Excellent music, lively fresh sound effects
REPLAY 6.5 Hard to play again, unless its multiplayer
GAMEPLAY 8 Fun Addictive Mechanism, Good fighitng and leveling system
CONTROL 8 Easy to learn, Easy to use, minor issues

OVERALL [8.5 x 2 + 9 x 2 + 6.5 x 1.5 + 8 x 3 + 8 x 1.5]/10 = 8.1 (Good)