It's always an odd feeling to be taught things by a videogame, but it's happened quite a few times. This time we're taught about Greek and Egyptian mythology through a long and arcing quest that sends your hero from a small town of Helos, Greece through that country to Athens and then across the Mediterranean to Egypt. The mythologies are woven very well throughout the game, from something as simple as the relics' names and attributes to the grand scale of fighting Telkines, the servants of the Titans.

That's not to say the game is in any way educationally-motivated. The only long prose portions of the game are told by philosophers scattered throughout the cities of the games, and speaking to them at all is entirely optional. It's just nice to know it's there. At its core Titan Quest still all about hack and slash, spells of destruction, and auras of power. It's just nice to see a change of setting from the standard "things have escaped from hell". Sure it's still the bad guys escaping their eternal prison, but at least they're different bad guys.

Deep down every action RPG is about two things: killing the enemy and getting rewarded for it. Titan Quest sticks to the formula with this portion, which is a very good thing. The game stays about smacking down hordes of enemies with weapons and magic right to the very end. The experience, the gear, and the renown you gain from conquering these many and massive beasts is right on par, from the leveling scale to the mounds of gold and all the fantastic weapons and armor.

Equipment plays a large part in this game, though the extent of that varies depending which classes you're playing. For warfare characters, equipment is the difference between a mighty warrior and a small hindrance in the enemies path. But for Summoners (a combination of Nature and Earth classes), the main use of armor is to gain magical effects of mana regeneration and intelligence boost. The equipment carries the usual classification system of mundane, magical, rare, epic and legendary, with sets of items strewn throughout. The gear in Titan Quest also has a very familiar labeling system, whereby every sword with lightning damage becomes a Static Blade.

There is one portion of the equipment system which becomes very annoying and eventually completely obsolete. The runes and charms of the game are so powerful and interesting towards the early portions of the game, imbuing your armor, weapons, rings and amulets with even more power to make you an even greater force. However, for some reason Iron Lore decided to make runes and charms become a giant joke about halfway through the first difficulty setting of the game. Around that point all of your gear will probably be blue, which is Epic gear. For some strange reason Iron Lore wanted one of the best parts of the game to be completely obsolete, so they made the runes and charms unusable on blue and purple items. By logic of evolution, eventually all of a players' equipment will be at least blue, and if they play later difficulty settings (a must for big fans) it will be entirely purple. Thus, less than half of even an average player who only plays through the core story once will still be spent wishing they could use what was really cool and a great addition to the game.

Visually Titan Quest can be quite an impressive game. The environments are sprawling, both over fields and mountains and under them in massive caves. They're filled with various patches of flora, portions of ancient ruins, and many, many baddies of all shapes and sizes. All of the creatures in the game are very well animated, covered in special effects and detailed to a great overall look and feel. The half-creatures are fantastically shaped, from the ever-present centaurs to the arachnids and ratmen. Sadly the sound is not as enjoyable. The music, though initially good quickly becomes repetitive, and far worse the dialog cuts off sometimes. When people are giving you side quests, many times their explanation for why they need a task done and how to do it cuts off both on screen and audibly, so all you're left with is a one sentence note in your journal.

Overall this truly is an amazing game. It has an extremely fun adventure, filled with insane beasts and exciting battles. The gear, the classes, and the many combinations of each bring hours of joy. With various stat builds and the mixture of character classes there is a huge amount of replay value. And all of this without even taking the ability to play multiplayer with friends. With Titan Quest, the fun has no end in sight.