It has been six years since Diablo II took the gaming world by storm and sucked away the lives of millions of video gamers. Ever since then, developers have been trying to emulate Diablo’s success by releasing their own hack-and-slash entries into the RPG arena. Most of them fail miserably and disappear without a trace. Dungeon Siege, and its sequel, made a solid go and did comparatively well, but did not manage to dislodge the Lord of Destruction. Titan Quest is the latest clone, from Ironlore Studios, and on paper, the game's quite a strong entry:

• Updated graphics
• Use of Greek, Egyptian and Chinese lore to capitalize of the recent success of God of War
• The option of a primary and secondary mastery for a total of 30 class combinations
• Each mastery containing a skill tree for personalized progression; randomly generated magical item and over 1000 unique items to be found and used
• The ability to play through the game in single player mode or multiplayer. Players can even take their ‘single player’ character and join up with friends online for a spell and then go back to soloing the game.

One of the only detriments seen before any play was the lack of a locked or closed server provided by the developers akin to Battle.net. While Ironlore included a multiplayer game search engine, it did not provide a set of servers to store characters for play. This results in the very easy ability for players to ‘cheat’ by modifying their characters outside of the game to result in higher stats, uber loot and the ability to

skip content. Ironlore admits this as a sacrifice but decided that the ability for players to host their own custom content, using the modding tools provided with the game at launch, was more important to them than providing an expensive service to a small player base.