Titan Quest II starts with a literal Greek tragedy. You arrive with the Spartans, the iconic warrior nation, at the height of their power, but it doesn’t take long before fate and the Gods intervene, striking them down with mystical fire and reducing them to nothing. Their ambition angered the goddess, and they paid the ultimate price. Yet, for all of this death and destruction, Titan Quest II begins with hope.
You begin your journey on Proti Island, your created character ready to embark on a tale worthy of myth and legend. Here in Early Access, you can choose from a selection of preset character builds and give them a name, but you have to assume that there’ll be a full character creation tool come the final release.
My Greek hero, Domocles, boasting olive skin and a hefty beard, began the game as all newly made characters should: barely clothed, with a puny sword strike and the ability to dodge. Fortunately, as soon as you beat up a few nearby pots, you immediately begin to build up your inventory, helping you protect yourself from the dangers that are coming your way.
This gear isn’t prescribed either, with different runs granting you different loot at different times. And there is so much loot. If there was really this much loot in Ancient Greece, Hercules would never have made it to the Underworld, he’d have been rummaging in his pack every two seconds.
Holding the attack button sees your character continually swing away with their sword, but it’s best to remember to dodge if you want to last more than a few moments here. It’s only a few short moments before you go from being newborn, bashing pots like a well-tanned Link, to going off to hunt a Gryphon, and you’ll have to be ready for an onslaught of crabs, wolves and undead on your way there.
Titan Quest II feels like a classic action RPG. You fight off monsters, collect loot, improve your weaponry and level up as you gain experience. It’s reassuringly familiar, but it’s also presented with such clarity and vision that you can’t help but be swept up within its historic setting and mythological beasts.
I especially love the music. It evokes the ancient setting so well, with its carefully attuned vocals and traditional instrumentation backed by the swells of more conventional Western orchestral strings. It’s packed with drama, nuance, and emotion, and I found myself repeatedly sitting back and listening to it while writing this article.
When you level up, you gain Attribute Points, and Titan Quest’s stats are dealt with in an interesting way, spread across Might, Agility, Vigor, and Knowledge. These go on to affect three further stats, with Fitness, Resolve and Cunning growing depending on where you’ve placed your previous points.
Alongside Attribute Points, you have Masteries, which deal with your skills. Here, you can level up each of your core abilities, but there’s further nuance and depth brought by then applying modifiers to each one, tailoring and specialising your character in a way that will make them truly unique to you.
These might range from upping the damage against wounded enemies, or giving you a chance to inflict Slow on them, and there’s so much to mess around with that you could find yourself falling down a menu-based rabbit hole. Still, we like that, right?
If you want even more specialisation, Titan Quest II will give you more, and once you’ve unlocked them, you have two further sets of abilities to choose from. Once again, this is Mastery, though this time you’re choosing between Earth, Rogue, Storm and Warfare.
Rather than being ancient X-Men, these specialisations funnel you towards spell-casting, fighting from the shadows or becoming a beast on the battlefield, unlocking further abilities within each one. I love the amount of customisation there is, even in Early Access, and I can see players really gelling with the various systems and options.
If you get things wrong, or head down a path towards Rage modifiers that you decide don’t work out for you, you can hit the Respec Mode, and reverse your choices. This isn’t free though, so expect to spend some of your hard-won Gold if you decide to hit reset.
While it clearly shares a great deal with Diablo, Titan Quest 2 has an undeniably different feel, with fewer enemies, at least at the outset, and a more considered approach to combat. It’s more grounded, which is almost amusing when you’re comparing demons and mythical beasts, but I felt that combat, even on the normal difficulty, was tougher here, making everything feel harder won.
If I was being picky, I’d like a little more weight and impact to your strikes, and hopefully that’s something that can be tweaked through Early Access. There’s also a little wonkiness with controller inputs when you’re in the menus that will need sorting out, but as it stands you can remedy everything as long as you’ve got your mouse lying in wait.
Titan Quest II makes a great first impression in Early Access. Its enveloping world, tough but fair combat and deep loot and experience trees, are perfectly weighted to pull you ever deeper into myth and legend.