Genre: RPG
Developer: Iron Lore Entertainment
Publisher: THQ

Titan Quest features perhaps the most organic natural world representation of any video game of all time. From the way grass and brush gently sways in the wind and to characters passing through, to the texture and palette choices, to the consistency of hills, paths, forests, and caves, the game strongly invites the player to imagine himself transported straight into the screen and onto the field of play like perhaps no other title.

Titan Quest's aural qualities are a bit of a mixed bag. The soundtrack, while featuring appropriate instrumentation and straddling a nice line between the aggressiveness of the combat and the gentle, natural world containing the chaos, is hardly memorable. The voice acting sounds spot-on in terms of accent, but horribly off in terms of intonation and general believability.

Much like Diablo II, Titan Quest involves marching from town to town while slashing and burning hordes of enemies, via mouse clicking, and is played in a 3/4 overheard perspective. The character classes are less interesting to play than those in Diablo II, but the excellent pacing, stirring baddie designs, and wonderful ragdoll physics implementation mean that the combat is largely satisfying anyway.

Titan Quest isn't as open-ended or distinctive as Sacred, and it's not as dark or moody as Diablo or its sequel. But in the Diablo sub-genre, where all of the games play pretty much the same anyway, the method by which a title separates itself is through aesthetics; Titan Quest scores big in this category, easily raising the game from mere mediocrity.