If you’ve been waiting to travel across the seven seas here’s your big chance. Go ahead and take the plunge. Titan Quest welcomes you to an action packed ancient world where the landscape is dotted with dungeons, both big and small. So, get ready to face the roughest of mountains, a wild landscape and the roaring waters.

Like in most role playing games, here too, the gamer makes a modest start. In fact, you keep proceeding pretty anonymously and do not even acquire any status before achieving level II. It is only when you go up to the second level that a range of choice opens up. But then, it might take you as many as 40 hours to cross the hurdles and make your way through Greece, Egypt and China before the final encounter.

However, despite the brighter side of a sense of adventure, the encounters in Titan Quest turn out to be pretty much predictable with little variety in terms of style. In fact, at one point, the gameplay boils down to a series of encounters with several groups of enemies. This can be tedious for the gamer. What further disappoints is that Titan Quest more or less follows in the footsteps of Diablo. The latter, already a successful game, is a safer bet. But for gamers familiar with Diablo and its sequel Diablo II, the plot, the visuals and the layout may seem familiar with little or no surprise element. Maybe for Iron Lore — the makers of Titan Quest — who are relatively fresh entrants in the game market, the Diablo model perhaps makes their venture a little less risky.

So although Titan Quest never quite escapes the long shadow of what came before, it does manage to please with a very long single-player campaign, and unlockable difficulty levels.

The game strictly focuses on the treasure factor and keeps posing hurdles to keep you away from winning the loot. However, in course of overcoming the series of hurdles and defeating your enemies, you realise that not much attention has been paid on the weapon distribution factor. For example, despite the different levels, the weapons used are much the same. One that you have already used in level one may also be the one that you are expected to use at a higher level.

And since the special weapons are essentially to be found in the wild rather than with the vendor, you lose the incentive to save up and buy weapons from the vendor. While you need enough energy to keep going, the slow health regeneration factor also turns out to be a deterrent.

However, the visuals of the game are easy on the eye and the game takes little time to load. The voice-over is well done, even though occasionally exhaustive. The dark and eerie ambience of the game is further accentuated by Titan Quest’s impressive real-time lighting and shadows.

Minimum system requirements: Operating System: Windows 2000/XP, processor: 1.8 GHz or higher, RAM: 512 MB or higher, free hard disk space: 5 GB or higher, video card: 64 MB or higher, DSL modem for multiplayer