Let's get in the game
Set in the world of ancient Greece and later moving into Egypt and Asia there are a fair few myths, monsters and titans to wade your way through in each of these areas. For example in Greece you will be fighting off the likes of Carrion Crows and Satyrs to start. Whilst talking to the quest giving characters you will hear tales about Heracles, (Hercules to the western world) and the creatures he fought for his place on Mount Olympus.
To set the scene when you first load up Titan Quest there is an epic video of a Greek warrior fighting Medusa, a half snake/half woman monster with snakes for hair, one look and she can turn you to stone. For the few that haven’t seen Clash of the Titans, she is one of the titans that has to be killed in order to kill the Kraken at the end of the film (a huge water bound monstrosity).
Click for larger imageCharacter creation couldn’t be simpler; you don’t get to choose how the character looks with facial and body build as you can on Oblivion. It is literally male or female and select the colour of the garment you wish to wear. Finally choose a name and away you go. Once you reach level 1 after killing a few beasties you choose what character class you wish to be. Character classes covered are the same as usual with games of this type, so there’s fighter, mage etc but we’ll go into these in more detail with the full review. As you may gather you don’t start as any particular character class, unlike Diablo 2 where you start out with a specific character type. Finally, on the character side of things, once you reach a high enough level you get to choose a second profession, similar to the way Guild Wars let’s you have a back-up skill.
Click for larger imageSkills work in the same way as Diablo 2; you get a skill tree where you choose what you want to work on. Skills in square boxes on the tree are ones you have add to the quick item bar. If the skill is a progressive build up attack you can set it to the left attack button. Any skills that are shown as circles don’t have to be equipped; they build up and just work alongside everything else and are always active. Finally, when you do level up you get 3 points to add to skills and 2 points to add to attributes. This is very similar to Oblivion, which is no bad thing… it makes you think about how you want to develop your character and gives you freedom to customise him or her they way you want.
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