Release of the Day: Titan Quest

I’ve been writing about ports from PC to mobile for three years. And I do not get tired of admiring. The very opportunity to play a game on a tablet, at which I sat in the evenings five or ten years ago – every time passes under the article “obvious-incredible”.

However, it usually does without miracles. A fabulous carriage from childhood or youth on mobile devices often turns into a pumpkin. The reasons may be completely different.

Max Payne suffered from management problems, Final Fantasy VII suffered from interface implementation, and Baldure’s Gate had too many bugs. But we also visited good ports on mobile. Sometimes even perfect. For example, The Knights of the Old Republic was played no worse than a native game. But, of course, it was not worth launching it from a smartphone.

The port of Titan Quest, whose history of recent years resembles the plot of Santa Barbara, is a solid middling in terms of implementation. And here I want to clap not so much for how the project is recreated, but for the very fact of the appearance of a three-dimensional action RPG with huge locations on mobile platforms.

But it would be unfair to say that the project is poorly played. That’s not so. From Titan Quest on iPad you get the main thing why you launch such applications – pleasure. This is still the same dynamic, fascinating antique “ideological heir” of the Diablo series, which originally appeared on PC in 2006.

From the host of shareware mobile action-RPG, like Dungeon Hunter, now flooding the market, the game is distinguished by a more meaningful gameplay, putting skills first, not grind. And this is perceived, no matter how ironic such words may sound, fresh.

So, if you were waiting for the “king” on the iPad, this is just the project that can completely replace it until Blizzard dares to do something role-playing for mobile devices. Note that no one guarantees that this can happen at all. The authors of Diablo have other concerns now.

As for the roughness of the mobile Titan Quest, they did not come from the side from which they could be expected. In terms of management, the game raises much fewer questions than Heroes of Might and Magic III HD from the same DotEmu. To sow death between the wild boars and satyrs who have flooded the gaming Hellas is pleasant, not stressful, nostalgic.

But when it comes to working with inventory, selecting items or a skill tree, as well as a pin twisted to a completely indecent size, I want to swear. Only to whom exactly – to the creators of the original or the developers who ported the game, who decided to leave some aspects “as is” – is an open question.

But, in general, these problems do not significantly spoil the feeling of the game. Only you need to stock up on good iron for it. The project did not want to be put on my old iPad 3. I had to use an office iPad Pro, which left positive impressions of the game in Titan Quest.

Speaking of Santa Barbara, since it was mentioned. The fact is that the studio-developer of the original Iron Lore Entertainment has been gone for a long time. Her former employees at Crate Entertainment recently released an excellent Grim Dawn on the Titan Quest engine. The publisher of Titan Quest is also no more. THQ declared itself bankrupt in 2012. The IP of the game was acquired by Nordic Games. Under the license of which DotEmu released the port. Thank them for that.

The editors thank the developers of the project for the provided version of the game.