When talking about Titan Quest with a friend recently and he described it as “the game that out-Diabloed Diablo”. I can’t imagine saying it any better. To me that was a bold statement having spent days and years playing all the Diablo games. Now the Early Access for Titan Quest 2 just dropped a 3 month patch on it’s not-quite-ready-for-primetime game that makes you wonder does the IP still hold up to and surpass its hellish cousin?
First thing to note is that this game is still in very Early Access with a projected release date of the end of 2026, there will be lots of changes and versions over the next year. The multiplayer aspect of the game is still in early enough phase that it’s not available for preview yet. This usually means the games will be far more polished and robust when they come out but the publishers have a preview level Early Access so usually is trying to drum up hype and knowledge of their game being in the works. Side quests and whole storylines haven’t been implemented yet and Early Access games can wind up being very different from the final product.
Titan Quest 2 is a top down dungeon crawler with with 4 current classes and multiple passive and active skill trees. The classes are Earth, Rogue. Storm and Warfare. We started with Warfare since the warrior class is usually one of the easier classes to master. With only four classes at this time players might be concerned that there isn’t enough variety of characters to play, no need to be. The class name is to give you a base to work with, different skills can be mixed together so that you might have a big old battle ax but with equipment and skill tree modifiers I can add poison or maybe lightning to create a very diverse attack and defense. Second time through we went with Earth and I found myself with a big old war axe and lots of warrior level armor while shooting huge fireballs when whole waves of critters come at me.
Controls are similar to other dungeon crawlers so once you get used to the camera system the rest is pretty intuitive. I played back and forth between the keyboard and the controller, both systems worked great for us to the point that if we got up to get a snack then come back to the computer we would randomly pick which we wanted to do. The program detected immediately whether you were on a controller or keyboard and swapped controls to your choice even going so far as to change the key/controller hints at the bottom of the screen. It’s the nice touches like those
The type of enemies to begin with might seem a little lacking mostly comprised of crabs, snakes and skeletons a majority of the time, it felt like they may have even been place holder NPCs for a more diverse enemy base later down the road. Think of them like the rats you wind up killing in just about every DnD campaign. NPCs already have some nice programming causing range to try to maintain range while tanks come right up on you to save their squishy mates and it’s not unheard of for enemies to run away, regroup, and give another run at you. The enemy critters and the environment in general have very nice colors and detail to them. This is particularly enjoyable since the game is designed as open environment with little nooks and crannies all throughout the maps to find hidden enemies and destroyable pots which drop gold and gear. Gear has multiple qualities determined by colors from grey to gold and just like in the first Titan Quest and Diablo games it can be drops or merchant purchases. On the subject of purchases the developers plan to drop updates, expansions and DLC but without micro-transactions. They plan to implement a crafting system that can take even a grey item and make it useful. It also seems the further you get along the better the store items available and that can be helpful if your drops aren’t too exciting.
There were some sound issues throughout the playthroughs but it is still at a point where rough cuts on cutaways and sound effects not working can be expected in the game and I expect many more patches and updates. Since the soundtrack for the game is available for purchase one can expect they are proud of what they’re working with and it will improve.
Being huge fans of the top down dungeon crawler genre we are excited to see how Titan Quest 2 develops over the next year and to see how it faces up to Diablo 4. It definitely needs some work but it hass got about 20 hours of playtime now with plenty of replayability between different classes, builds, and additions that will continue beyond game release once that time arrives. Expect updates here at Gamingshogun.com!
