:B: - Titan Quest - Immortal Throne

As you may well be aware, Diablo III came out last month. And, if you've read my previous article on the game you might also be aware that I have not and will not be purchasing it. However, I'm not immune to Diablo fever, so I've devised a scheme.

Meet the Ginormous List of Diablo Clones. This is, as far as I know, the most complete list of Diablo-like games on the internet. Games where you clicky-clicky loot and monsters, perhaps with a heavy story structure, but mostly just "here are some things go kill them now plx". If I can get a max-level character and beat the highest difficulty setting on each of these games (barring inability to load game on 64-bit Windows or the game being absolute crap), I can buy Diablo 3. And by the time that happens, always-online issues probably won't matter anyway.

Enter Titan Quest. I got this a couple Christmas's ago in the THQ pack in the Steam sale. I played it way back when but gave up about 3/4s of the way through Act 1 due to framerate issues. That isn't a problem on my new laptop so I've been having a great amount of fun.

I felt a bit of fatigue towards the end of Act 3 and throughout Act 4, so I stopped doing sidequests and powered through to the end. I felt like by the end of the game there was a lot less imagination in the monster design, I had stopped picking up any item drop less than Green and I ended up with way more than the caravan could hold just in set items and artifact recipe ingredients.

After playing a little bit of Epic difficulty and receiving a higher level of ingredients I went back to Normal to farm lower level ones. I'd like to finish all the artifacts I have recipes for before getting a bunch of higher level ones as as far as I can tell some higher level ones need lower level artifacts as ingredients. And it's kind of nice now I'm not feeling the pressure to see the end of the game, I'm just killing dudes and watching their bodies fly for miles.

4/5 stars.

Operation Titan Quest

With the recent release of Diablo 3 I have been feeling the call of the dungeon crawler. Unfortunately, I won't be buying Diablo 3 as my internet connection is not reliable and I will not knowingly buy games that force the player to be online when the game has a large single player component. So instead of supporting Blizzard's choice to force me into socializing, I've made a long list of games that have the same gameplay and I'm playing through that first, and by the time I'm finished, the entire country will probably have always-on internet and it'll be less of an issue.

First up is Titan Quest: Immortal Throne which I've had for a couple of years already but never got particularly far in. I still had my old character, but having imported it from the base game to Immortal Throne, the expansion, it started me back from the beginning so I just started a new character so as to refamiliarize myself with the game.

Titan Quest is a Diablo clone that is based in ancient history. You start off in Ancient Greece and fight all manner of beasties including harpies, gorgons and Minotaurs, and continue onto Ancient Egypt in Act II. It has all the loot you'd expect from a Diablo clone and it's really cool seeing all the different areas and monsters based around mythology.

I've put about 12 and a half hours into this character so far and I'm having a ton of fun, but that might be because I'm a bit of an ancient history and a mythology nut. My guy is Warrior/Defense and I think maybe I should have picked something else because he's really overpowered right now. Pretty much nothing touches him and I've picked up 200+ health potions so if something did hurt I'd be able to heal it right back up. Still, this is only normal difficulty, which is always easy in these sorts of games, so maybe the tides will turn once I'm onto Epic difficulty.

 Find the Ginormous List of Diablo Clones here.