Videos
Reviews:
-
Unfortunately, I would be remiss not to detail the numerous issues this port of the game has, and some of them are a real bummer. Probably the most irksome shortcoming is with the method of auto-targeting. In the majority of situations it works “well enough” and will lock on to your closest enemy. Since this isn’t a twin-stick shooter this does make sense to a degree, but the concern is with the implementation and its wonky nature as you get yourself into numerous scenarios. You’ll first notice situations where for whatever reason you’ll target an enemy further away, forcing you to either retreat or work through a bit of a beating from enemies right on top of you until you kill your target so your focus can shift to something else. Where this gets to be a significant problem is when there’s a larger and more powerful enemy with a mob nearby and your character is insistent on targeting the little guys while their boss is delivering an ass-whooping. I’m sorry, but no ability to control or toggle between targets quickly and easily plain sucks. The other issue I have is with the implementation of the menu systems, which I would most politely call cumbersome. No doubt this is a bit of a casualty of a game being converted to being console friendly while it began life on PC but there really isn’t much sign that any of this was given much thought or care. Over the course of the campaign in this game you can reasonably expect to be able to measure the time you spend managing your inventory in hours more easily than minutes. It’s hard to specify what you want to pick up in a cluster of drops and if your inventory is running high you’ll need to be sure to drop things some distance away to avoid potentially having those items added to the confusion. Of course you could hope that given the Switch’s touchscreen there could have been an easy solution to some of these problems but unfortunately there is no support for it. Taking everything into account, including its surprisingly high asking price, and considering the title’s age, Titan Quest on the Switch is simply not a very good deal. I’m trying not to be cynical but given the lack of anything from this general genre on the console this feels like little more than an attempt to capitalize on Diablo fans starved for a shot at even a facsimile of that play in a portable form before something less dated (and hopefully showing more care) arrives. Despite my misgivings with the care and quality of the port this is still a very playable game that offers a reasonably good experience considering there currently are no alternatives. Regardless, given at least one other competitive title that’s planned for Switch in the coming months I’d be more inclined to advocate a “wait and see” attitude and hold out little longer before taking the plunge.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [5.5]