It's never a surprise when a game demonstration doesn't match up to its final version. We see "Bullshots" all over the place that don't represent actual gameplay and we hear empty promises about functionality that never sees the light of day. Well, Titan Quest at least to me promised to be Diablo II but set in the ancient Mediterranean. And in this they have succeeded. In almost too many ways, since they even captured some of the annoying features of the original, namely the broken mechanism for sorting differently sized items into your inventory. It never really bothered me in the original game or in this one, but several games since then have implemented auto sort features that eliminate this issue that has apparently frustrated so many individuals.

Where this game really bit the big one is really hard to categorize. If I had to classify it, I'd call it Installation/Startup difficulty. It's a retarded classification because with consoles you very rarely have issues getting a game to boot up. Not so with our friend the PC. Not all games are created equally for the PC and while some (like those developed by Blizzard Entertainment) do not have these issues there is no common hardware platform for them all to comply to. It's for this reason that I could not originally get the game to work.

That's right. I did what any gamer would do. I popped the disc in the tray, waited for the install screen and proceeded to copy a DVDs worth of content to my hard drive. Afterwards, it gave me the option to “Play Titan Quest.” Well hot damn, that's exactly what I want to do. Click. Wait. Error: Geometry Engine Failed to Initialize.

What? Did I do something wrong? Apparently I did. I checked my DirectX version and it seemed up to date, but what the hell, I bore down into the DVD directory structure and find the DirectX installer. Run that bad boy and I get a message saying I'm all set. Awesome, let's see how this game plays. Wrong. The next message I get is that I don't have a legit copy of the disc and to please insert it. I open the tray, thinking again that I am the offender and sure enough it's in place. Try again and no dice. I browse some files, check out some folders on the disc, convince myself I'm not crazy and try again. This time, the game loads and I get a cool swoopy intro with stuff flying everywhere.

There's a nicely animated intro, but nothing that is over the top these days.

I jump in, create a character and start leveling. I notice that the graphics are a bit flickery so I jump to the graphics settings and turn on vertical sync and verify a few other settings. It improves quite a bit, but I can still see some frame dropping that is bothersome, but not a show stopper for yours truly. Admittedly, some may have lost interest at that point and relegated it to the bargain bin, but I was seriously interested in some retro Diablo action and it wasn't THAT bad to begin with.

The game starts out easy to get you used to it, but when you get close to Red bosses, it can get a bit hairy. You can use a portal stone instead of scrolls like in Diablo to jump back to town and sell all the items you collect that you have no interest in keeping. This negates, to an extent, the lack of a house or bank to deposit longer term items. When you get to a certain level, you get a backpack which as memory serves can hold as much as the bank did so there's really no reason to bitch in my opinion. You also don't have to go find your corpse and lose your gold when you die like in Diablo, so there's really no reason to have a bank.

All in all, the game is rather unremarkable but I had a decent time playing it. No harm in ripping off another game, especially since they did a reasonable job of doing it. Had they botched it, it would've been a different story. I can't give it as good a grade as I'd like to because of the installation issues, and it's not an original concept but it still manages to be a fun little game.