Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City - DLC Review

The Ringed City is the second and final DLC for Dark Souls 3, and supposedly the final piece of content that will ever be produced in the Dark Souls series. Its story continues where Ashes of Ariandel left off; after defeating the final boss of the Painted World of Ariandel, you gain access to a bonfire that warps you to a new area, the Dreg Heap, where you go on a brief journey through the dilapidated ruins of past Dark Souls environments en route to the Ringed City, where Slave Knight Gael (who beckoned you into Ariandel) hopes to find the Dark Soul of Man so that his niece, the painter from Ashes of Ariandel, can use it to create a new world.

This DLC introduces two new areas (the Dreg Heap and the Ringed City itself), four new bosses (one of which is optional), a new covenant, all new enemies, plus a bunch of new weapons, armor sets, and spells. As part of the release, FromSoft also released a patch for the base game which tweaks some balance issues (mainly buffing strength weapons and heavy armor) and which also adds two new maps to the PVP arena, which is only accessible if you've purchased either of the two DLCs. The first DLC, Ashes of Ariandel, felt a little too short and underwhelming to recommend to anyone but die-hard fans; for the same price, The Ringed City offers over twice as much content, a lot of which is pretty unique stuff that's never really been seen or done before in a Souls game, so it's pretty easy to recommend.

Facing off with a ringwraith in the Ringed City. 

Unfortunately, The Ringed City basically requires Ashes of Ariandel to make sense, since it's a continuation of that DLC's story. Not that there's a lot of prominent storytelling in this DLC (or any Souls games, for that matter), but the whole point of Gael being in the Ringed City is established in Ashes of Ariandel -- if you haven't met him in the previous DLC, then he's just some random guy who shows up at the end, and the ending is almost completely meaningless to you. In fact, you can't even trigger the DLC's proper ending without owning Ashes of Ariandel, because it requires you to go back there to talk to the painter with the item you obtain from the final boss. So really, if you want to play The Ringed City (which I'd definitely recommend) then you need to shell out the extra money for Ashes of Ariandel (or rather, the season pass, since it's $5 cheaper to buy them bundled together).

Per usual, the story is so incredibly vague this time around, with no clear explanation for what's going on. As the final bit of DLC for the entire series, I'm sure a lot of people were hoping for some answers to some of the nagging lore questions that have been around since the first Dark Souls, but this DLC may actually pose more questions than it answers. It does shed some new light on Gwyn, the Furtive Pygmy, what was going on before the first Dark Souls, what goes into creating a world, and perhaps most ultimately, what the titular "Dark Soul" actually is, but it does so in typical Souls fashion where everything is so intentionally vague and cryptic that it feels like anything you could gleam from this DLC would be just speculation and fan fiction. Still, this is the first time in any Souls game, I think, that I found myself actually caring about the lore and story enough to study item descriptions and actually think about what it all means, and that's probably because it tries to go full circle by relating back to the first Dark Souls, as opposed to just adding yet more lore on top of an already convoluted mythology.

Talking to an NPC at the top of the Dreg Heap.

I really like what they did with the Dreg Heap, for instance -- environments from previous games are built on top of each other, seemingly symbolizing that each new Age of Fire creates a new world over-top of the previous one. So in order to get to the Ringed City (which presumably predates Dark Souls 1), you have to basically go back in time through the series, starting with the High Wall of Lothric from Dark Souls 3, then descending to the Earthen Peak from Dark Souls 2, and finally descending to the Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls 1. All of these are portrayed as dilapidated, crumbling ruins that have endured thousands of years of erosion, and they get progressively more dilapidated and unrecognizable the deeper you go. Some parts look like they're just barely hanging on from falling into the abyss, and it serves as a really cool visual symbol for how time progresses in this universe.

The level design in this DLC has some interesting things going on, too, with a lot of hidden areas that really test your observation skills and willingness to risk your death in dangerous scenarios. A lot of routes branch into one-way paths so you have to really think about where you want to go, and it encourages you to go through some areas multiple times to get and see everything. I consider myself a pretty thorough explorer, and I was surprised at how many things I missed in my playthrough, after going online to look things up.

Having now made four Souls games and six DLC packs, a lot of stuff has gotten to feel incredibly similar, with large chunks of each game essentially feeling like a rehash of something from a previous game -- some things are straight up copy-and-pasted from game to game. The Ringed City, somehow, manages to feel fresh and interesting for at least half of it, even though the other half implements yet another iteration of a poison swamp, Ornstein, Patches, a fire-breathing dragon guarding a bridge, the Old Monk boss fight from Demon's Souls, and so on. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to encounter so many things that I hadn't seen before, like the angels that hover above certain areas like sentry turrets raining constant laser beams from above, who can't be killed unless you find a hidden controller/host-thing somewhere in the level, or the giant summoner dudes who summon hordes of orange phantom archers and black knights who can't be touched, requiring you to navigate your way to the summoner and kill him while dodging the phantoms.

"Hmmm, what's going on here? Aaaaand I'm dead."

This new stuff, unfortunately, is incredibly tedious and frustrating. The laser angels and phantom summoners are basically instant death machines that require you to die repeatedly just to figure out the solution of how to beat them. That's true of many Souls enemies, particularly bosses, and these enemies function a lot like mini-bosses in the form of environmental hazards, but unlike a well-designed boss, you don't usually learn anything helpful about how they function or what you're supposed to do when you die to them. Against one of the angels, I died 3-4 times just trying to explore the area to see if I could find the controller, another 3-4 times trying unconventional stuff that I figured probably wouldn't work, and another 2-3 times trying to get an item. Once I finally figured out where I had to go, I died 3-4 times trying to drop down from the right, which it turns out you can't do, and then another two times trying to drop down from the left before finally getting there.

That was about 30 minutes of constant dying against an enemy that I couldn't even fight back against, very early in the DLC, and it's immediately followed by another angel in the poison swamp. The first one you encounter is at least fair about showing you where the controller is so that you have an idea of where to go; the second and third ones are so well-hidden that you have to scour the entire map top to bottom, checking all kinds of unconventional areas while getting hammered by undodgeable, hyper-accurate, rapid-fire laser beams. Once you make it out of the Dreg Heap and into the Ringed City, you're presented with yet another one of these scenarios, this time with the giant summoner dude whose archers are completely invulnerable and one-shot you if they catch you in the open. Then, you have two encounters with a fire-breathing dragon who, if he doesn't kill you with the fire, will likely knock you off the bridge and into a pit of death.

Going Sunbro to help people with the angel in the poison swamp.

Each one of those scenarios takes you out of the usual Dark Souls gameplay of exploring an area and fighting enemies to put you into a cover-based puzzle-platformer scenario where any little mistake leads to an instant death. And that's not always very fun, especially since there's no real challenge in the actual gameplay. Take the angels, for instance -- they basically just kill you automatically if you walk out from cover, and the whole gameplay premise is moving from cover to cover while trying to find the hidden controller. There are hardly any enemies around them; they're very nearly the only threat in the area. So imagine if the angels didn't do that constant, lethal barrage of lasers and instead shot more sporadically while you had to fight enemies; that would involve spatial awareness, watching the angel out of the corner of your eye or listening for attack sounds, and then timing your dodges properly. That would be challenging while allowing you to avoid death through skill, while also allowing you to actually explore the area.

I like to take these games slowly and explore everywhere possible, but the angels don't allow you to do that all. They basically force you to run straight through an area, running from cover to cover, never giving you time to stop and look around, while also forcing to stop playing the game for 30 seconds at a time while you wait for it to stop its barrage and turn around so that you can get a head start on the next run. And the whole thing is pure trial-and-error, dying to figure out what their range is, dying to figure out if you can dodge or outrun their attacks, dying to figure out what gives you sufficient cover, and dying to figure out the correct route to the controller. They're just not fun to deal with, and I wish they'd been designed better. At least they stay permanently dead once you kill the controller, even if you reset the area by resting at a bonfire, so each one is only a pain in your ass once.

Fighting Darkeater Midir. What a great boss fight. 

The four bosses, on the other hand, are all pretty good, and may be reason enough to buy the DLC all on their own. The first one may be the only two-enemy boss in the entire series that didn't give me fits, and it reuses the Ornstein and Smough mechanic where the order in which you kill them determines the type of enemy you'll be facing in the second phase. The second boss is basically the Old Monk boss fight from Demon's Souls, where the boss is another player summoned into the arena with buffed defenses and unique abilities. The third boss is optional and involves yet another dragon fight, but this one is easily the best in the entire series, basically what the Ancient Dragon from Dark Souls 2 should've been. The final boss is like a supercharged version of Artorias and may be my new favorite boss just because of how fun he is to fight and how epic the fight feels. He and the dragon are some of the hardest bosses of the entire series, but unlike most of the other "tough" bosses they feel totally fair, and so it felt incredibly satisfying once I mastered their movesets and was able to take them down.

There's a lot of content in this DLC (over twice as much as in Ashes of Ariandel) but the pacing is still a little weird, with three of the four bosses kind of clumped together near the very end of the DLC. After the "Old Monk" boss it basically goes right into the final boss; it warps you into this huge desert wasteland with a few crumbling ruins nearby and a giant castle in the distance, and so I was thinking I still had an entire third act to complete which would involve making my way to the castle and then exploring it. And then I wandered a short distance and stumbled into a boss whom I didn't even realize was the final boss at that moment. There's really no buildup to the final boss, which makes him seem to come out of left field. You really should've had some kind of brief encounter with him somewhere earlier in the DLC, or else there should've been more NPCs talking about him to set the stage for you when the fight finally occurs. 

Welcome to the wasteland.

Continuing Dark Souls' tradition of being deliberately vague and obscure, there's a riddle that you need to solve to complete an NPC's quest line, which is a message carved into a random hallway that reads: "Show your humanity." And the solution, of course, is something you'd never be able to figure out short of consulting a guide or doing a bunch of trial-and-error trying every conceivable thing possible. I'm just going to go ahead and spoil it: you need to use a chameleon spell or white tree branch while standing in the swamp to camouflage yourself as a humanity phantom -- a thing that hasn't been in the series since Dark Souls 1. Maybe if they'd let you see a humanity phantom somewhere in the swamp then you'd have some kind of clue that turning into one was even possible; otherwise there's no logical correlation that would lead you to that solution. 

The ending is ... anticlimactic. The final boss is a random side-character with no buildup whatsoever, and there's not even a final cutscene -- it's just a few lines of dialogue. It might've been nice to have a more concrete resolution for the series, but this simple ending works by being completely true to the Dark Souls way of storytelling. Still, the process of getting there is pretty fun and satisfying, with some of the best bosses of Dark Souls 3 (or even the entire series) and some truly challenging scenarios -- even if you have to contend with occasionally bullshit level/enemy design -- that I think The Ringed City is definitely worth playing.

UPDATE:
Since the publication of this review, FromSoft have released a patch for Dark Souls 3, and one of the things it does is balance those obnoxious angels in the Dreg Heap by reducing the amount of damage they do. I ran through the DLC on another character and can confirm that they're now a little more forgiving -- it seems like it's actually possible to outrun some of their attacks, which means that they're no longer simply "instant death machines" if they catch you out in the open, while still requiring you to move quickly and seek cover intelligently. 

Great Games You Never Played: Wizardry 8

Wizardry 8 is a first-person party-based dungeon-crawling three-dimensional open-world role-playing game. Released in 2001 as the final entry in the long-running Wizardry series (which began in 1981 as one of the very first computer-RPGs), Wizardry 8 completes the "Dark Savant" trilogy that began with Wizardry 6, throughout which you're trying to stop an evil villain known as the Dark Savant from gaining access to the Cosmic Forge -- the tools used by the gods to create the universe, which hold the power to create, destroy, or change anything in the universe by simply writing its history into existence. Despite being a continuation of the story from the previous two games (your save files can be carried through all three games), Wizardry 8 works fine as a stand-alone title, although you'll miss a lot of references and it might take you a little longer to understand the backstory.

As part of a game series borne of the 1980s, Wizardry 8 definitely has that vintage, old-school vibe to it, but with the advantage of a much more modern skin which makes it a much easier game to get into. That's absolutely crucial, because this is a truly great RPG that easily ranks among the best RPGs ever made. It's not perfect, mind you -- there's one crucial problem that made me almost want to quit, and it's a little rough around the edges due to developer SirTech's dwindling budget -- but it's got one of the most robust party-creation systems ever implemented in a video game, and one of the best turn-based combat systems of any RPG. Not to mention a fairly sizable open-world with an interesting blend of fantasy and science-fiction elements, and a non-linear main-quest-line that allows for a lot of rewarding exploration and discovery.

If you're importing save files from Wizardry 7, then the start of Wizardry 8 can happen one of several different ways, with your party starting in completely different parts of the world with different starting configurations of the main quest depending on your choices in Wizardry 7. If, like me, you haven't played Wizardry 7 and are starting Wizardry 8 completely fresh, then you begin by creating your party of one-to-six adventurers, who are hired as bodyguards by a researcher on an expedition to another planet in search of an ancient artifact. Your party boards his spaceship, and as you arrive at the planet Dominus, the Dark Savant's black ship appears in orbit and shoots you down; you crash land outside a monastery in the mountains, left to fend for yourself on a foreign planet. As you explore the monastery, you meet an android who sets you on your main quest to retrieve the three mystical relics necessary to complete the ritual of Ascension and become a Cosmic Lord -- essentially a god in charge of overseeing the universe -- before the Dark Savant, who's also trying to Ascend so that he can take control of the universe.

Your first look at this foreign world, being welcomed by a treasure chest.

Already you're presented with a pretty novel concept for a main quest (become a space-god) in a world that blends typical fantasy tropes with modern and futuristic technology. This is a world seemingly built around medieval architecture and customs that somehow has also mastered space travel. The local human town of Arnika has a religious temple with priests who can sell you divine spellbooks right next to a spaceport powered by computers, a blacksmith who forges swords and breastplates right next to a jail with force-field prison cells. The juxtaposition of medieval fantasy and science fiction motifs may seem a bit weird and jarring, but the game plays this theme pretty straight and doesn't call attention to itself. As opposed to a game like Arcanum, where the steampunk blend of magic and technology is considered one of its main draws, the blend in Wizardry 8 feels almost incidental -- you almost take it for granted that this is just the way the world is.

It's pretty easy to find yourself immersed in this world. A lot of that has to do with the first-person perspective that allows you to freely roam its open world with traditional WASD and mouselook controls (you have to remap movement from the arrow keys to WASD), right-clicking the mouse to switch between mouselook and cursor control. An automap function helps you keep track of where you are, but it's not always necessary because most of the world's areas are designed with purposeful structure, which makes them pretty easy to navigate just by looking around and learning their layouts through simple observation. The automap becomes more of a necessity in some of the game's more labyrinthine "dungeons," and unfortunately it doesn't do a very good job whenever you're in an area with multiple floors or vertical levels, because the maps compress everything to a two-dimensional overhead view where a lot of information gets covered up by overlap.

The graphics look a little dated, even by 2001 standards -- just take a look at the 2D textures on the overly-polygonal NPCs, or some of the drab, flat-looking roads between major locations -- but most of the major areas have a pretty distinct aesthetic look to them, like the stone castle at Marten's Bluff, or the Trynnie village built in the Trynton treetops, or the tropical beaches of Bayjin Bay. It's not technically very impressive, but it gets the job done and gives each area a unique atmosphere. Where the visuals simply fail is in the game's incredibly short draw distance, which limits you to seeing only 50-100 yards in front of you at any given time, which is problematic in open areas where you literally can't see the horizon to know where you're going. Unlike Silent Hill, there's no fog or clever thematic excuse to get around this -- the game just doesn't render the environment. Fortunately, the draw distance can be adjusted with mods, which I highly recommend doing, although it can bog the engine down and bring the framerate to a crawl in denser environments like the swamp or Ascension Peak.

Scuba-diving in the shallows near Bayjin Bay.

The game's sound design is much more impressive than its visual design, with the music, voice acting, and sound effects perhaps contributing more to the game's immersive atmosphere than the visuals. There's a sound effect for nearly every action in the game, from dropping different types of items into your inventory to turning a dial on a control panel. Weapons have different "whooshing" and impact sounds, depending on the weapon and the thing you're hitting, and your footsteps make different noises depending on the type of surface you're walking on. The soundtrack uses a lot of traditional symphonic orchestrations for things like combat, but most of the time the music uses a fairly ambient, minimalist approach that helps to create tone and atmosphere for different locations without ever feeling repetitive. Other times the music captures an almost JRPG-type of vibe, such as with the camping music, the Arnika theme, or the T'Rang theme. Meanwhile, every character in the game is fully voice-acted, including your own customizable party members.

Party creation has to be, without a doubt, Wizardry 8's best feature, as it's the most robust system I've ever seen in an RPG. When creating a character to join your party of six, you get 15 different classes to choose from (fighter, rogue, lord, monk, ninja, samurai, valkyrie, bard, ranger, gadgeteer, priest, bishop, alchemist, psionic, mage), all of which have different skills and unique abilities, and 11 different races to choose from (human, elf, hobbit, gnome, dwarf, faery, felpurr (cat-person), rawulf (dog-person), lizardman, dracon (dragonoid), mook (wookiee)), all of which have different attributes which make certain races better suited for certain classes. While it's possible to make a dwarven ninja, for instance -- if you want the dwarf's natural ability to resist damage -- a felpurr would start with much higher attributes. Once you've picked a class, race, and gender, you get to allocate any bonus attribute points you might have leftover, and then you can allocate skill points in several different skills, many of which are unique to the class you select. These range from common skills like mythology, artifacts, close combat, communication, and so on to specific weapon proficiencies and class-specific skills like lockpicking, stealth, music, critical strike, and so on.

Then, once all of the statistical choices are made, you get to name your character, choose his or her portrait from several different options per race (these are all animated with the character blinking, closing their eyes when you camp, and moving their mouths when they talk), and then select their voice and personality. The voice and personality options are surprisingly deep, with nine different personality types (aggressive, chaotic, kind, intellectual, cunning, laidback, burly, eccentric, and loner) and two different voices for each personality type for each gender, for a total of 38 different voices. Each voice within each personality, both male and female, not only sounds different, but also has its own different lines and way of speaking. Your party members don't really banter with each other or other NPCs, but they comment on a bunch of different things at different times, like reacting to winning a fight, or upon entering certain areas, or after talking to certain NPCs. The voice acting really brings these custom characters to life, and it's such a great feeling when you're able to find the perfect match for how you envision each of your characters.

Assembling a party from the pre-made characters. 

There are so many good choices to make when it comes to creating characters that you can spend 30-60 minutes making your party at the start of the game, and then come back after finishing the game to spend another 30-60 minutes making an entirely different party. It doesn't have to be that long and complicated if you don't want it to, however; you could spend as little as 30 seconds selecting party members from any of the 15 pre-built characters and be on your way, or use them as guidelines for speeding up the process of making your own. You have eight slots in your party, but you can only fill six of them to form your core party; the remaining two slots can be filled by recruitable NPCs that you meet while exploring Dominus, if you desire. These characters have fixed starting stats, and most of them have limitations about where they'll go with you, but they otherwise behave like regular party members; you get full control over their actions in combat, their equipment, and you can even manage their level-ups.

Party composition is important in this game, and you get a ton of possible options for what kind of party you want to make, with several different types of melee fighters, ranged fighters, spellcasters, and support classes. When creating your party, you might want to consider having a balanced spread of roles, but you also have to think about what weapons different party members will use, and how you'll arrange party members in your formation. Older Wizardry games had you set your characters up in a front row or back row, with melee fighters up front and ranged classes in the back; since Wizardry 8 takes place in a three-dimensional environment, and enemies can come at you from all directions, you have to set your party up in a circular formation that strikes a balance between protecting your squishier party members from the flanks and rear while also letting all your party members engage in critical combat areas at all times.

The combat formation is divided into four quadrants -- the front, rear, left, and right flanks -- with a protected center circle in the middle. You can place up to three party members in each region. Different weapons have different range values, with swords, maces, axes, wands, and daggers all being considered short range -- meaning they can only engage in combat zones directly in front of them -- while polearms, staves, flails, and certain greatswords are considered extended range, and can hit enemies two combat zones away. A dagger user on the left flank will serve as a meatshield for protecting your squishy mages in the center circle, but he'll only be able to attack enemies on the left flank, whereas a polearm user would be able to attack the left, front, or rear zones. Enemies likewise have different range values, with some enemy attacks being capable of penetrating your formation to hit enemies in the center or rear zones, and if your party members are turned to face enemies and get hit in the back, they take extra damage. Long range weapons (bows, crossbows, slings, guns, throwing weapons) have no zone restrictions but are partially affected by line of sight.

Fighting slimes: a fantasy-RPG classic. 

Combat happens in the real three-dimensional space of the environment -- there are no random encounters, and you're not warped to a separate battlefield to carry out the fight. Typically, you see enemies wandering around the environment, and when you or they get close enough you go into combat mode, which can either be set to turned-based (where the action pauses at the start of each round so that you can issue commands) or continuous (where combat flows at a continual pace, your party members automatically following their last given order when their initiative order comes up). As an old-school "blobber," your party is represented in the 3D space as a single "blob," with the first-person view of the camera representing your party's central position and facing. So if you're fighting a group of rats, combat will initiate while they're still at range and you can queue up a "move" action to move your party towards them, or let your ranged fighters take shots while they come to you; they'll likely start to surround your party, and you may have to move party members around within the formation or change the formation's facing as the fight goes on to ensure everyone can participate at all times.

Combat can end up being incredibly tactical, with you having to make decisions about who should be targeting what enemies and adjusting your positioning as the situation demands. You can even use the environment to your advantage; if you put your back against a wall, you can condense your formation, knowing that your back is safely protected, by putting your ranged fighters in the back and your melee fighters in the center circle and side flanks, thereby allowing everyone (even short-ranged fighters on the flanks) to attack the front; if you set yourself up in a narrow hallway you can funnel enemies towards you from one direction and blast multiple enemies with AOE cone attacks. Spells target either a single enemy or an entire group of enemies, or else have an area of effect depending on where you aim them. Some spells are cones and shoot out a 45-degree wedge in whatever direction you aim it, while others are radius spells that hit all enemies within a certain range of wherever you place the center of the spell. Like other types of ranged attacks, these are affected by line of sight -- you can't shoot around corners, and enemies behind obstacles (or other enemies) are sometimes safe from damage or being targeted.

Wizardry 8 may take the cake for the best party-based combat system I've ever experienced in an RPG. As much as I enjoy the action-point combat system of the original Fallout games, I think I might like Wizardry 8's a little better. There's a lot that you can do within the system: changing your party's formation and facing, moving into different positions to use the environment to your advantage, assigning different targets, switching weapons to reach different targets, using any of the dozens of potions, bombs, and powders to buff your party or attack/debuff enemies, and casting any of about 100 different spells with dozens of different functions. This isn't a combat system where you just spam attack commands and wait for the battle to end; every round has some kind of engaging decision to be made.

Getting attacked by bandits on the road.

Unfortunately, combat is also the reason I almost quit playing after making it a mere 18 hours through the game's 80-100 hour campaign. While the combat has a lot of stimulating tactical depth to it, with clever implementation of turn-based systems in a 3D world, there is, frankly, way too much of it in this game, to the point that the fun and satisfaction gets replaced with frustrating tedium. There are two problems with Wizardry 8's combat: constant respawn and enemy level-scaling. If you spend an hour exploring an area, killing everything in the process, when you inevitably have to come back through that area (you're going to be constantly running back and forth between locations as quests demand) the entire map will have been repopulated with random new spawns who'll aggro you from all the way across the map, seemingly, to force you into combat. That wouldn't be such a problem if the fights were quick and simple, but they're not, because enemies scale up to your level (to a certain point) so that you're basically always fighting evenly-leveled enemies that give you an even challenge in every single fight, even if you've improved four levels since the last time you were in that area.

It's worth mentioning that enemies only ever scale up to your level, never down, and that only applies to the random clusters of enemies that are spawned periodically to keep each area "active." Even then, there appears to be an upper limit to different areas for how high enemies will scale; in the starting areas, enemies might only scale up to level 12, whereas later areas might scale up to level 30. So when you come back to the starting areas at level 20 you might finally have an easier times with the enemies. Besides these random spawns, each area also has a number of set encounters with enemies who have fixed levels. The bandits occupying the ruined house in the northern wilderness will always be level 8-9, the golem guarding the bridge to the mountain wilderness will always be level 14, and so on. These enemies do not respawn when they're killed, and the fact that they start out higher level than you and don't scale down means there's always incentive to level up and get stronger because you want to beat these enemies to complete quests, or to gain access to new areas, or to get pre-placed items and equipment.

That constant respawn of "trash" mobs (who really aren't trash, since they always put up an evenly-matched fight) really wears on your soul, however, and it's especially bad in the early areas of the game when you're stuck wandering pointless roads that only exist to spread major locations out and to force you into combat. After making it to the first town, I decided to head south and spent forever struggling against really tough enemies, and so decided to reload my save and head north, instead. I made it pretty far that way but then reached an area where one of my recruitable party members wouldn't go, and so I turned around and went back to town, bought better gear, and set out south again. I made it further that time, but then got diseased by some rats, which forced me to turn around and go back to town to cure the disease. I set out south again and made it even further before running into an NPC who gave me a quest that sent me right back to town. Meanwhile I'd been playing for nearly six hours and I'd gotten nowhere and done virtually nothing except fight endless random spawns.

A Screaming Head attacking the party.

It's not just because the fights are so frequent (they even spawn in towns, a cardinal sin as far I'm concerned), but also because they tend to drag on forever. Combat is incredibly slow, with enemy attack animations taking much longer than they need to, and with awkward pauses between every enemy activating. If you're going to play Wizardry 8 you basically need to install a mod that speeds up combat; by default, a fight with a group of common trash mobs can take as long as 30 minutes if you're stuck waiting for 20 of them to activate their painfully slow animations one-by-one every single round. That's not fun or challenging, it's just annoying, and it gets even worse when you consider how many status effects exist in this game. There's poison, blindness, terror, irritation, nausea, disease, insanity, turncoat, slow, swallowed, paralyzed, webbed/stuck, drained, unconscious, hexed, and it's just an obnoxious pain in the ass dealing with any of these, especially when you consider that seemingly half of the enemies in the game spam these obnoxious status effects AOE on the entire party.

You improve your characters' abilities through a combination of using them and by allocating skill points during each level-up. In combat, this means your tank will automatically improve his sword and shield skills just by attacking and being attacked, which will be happening every single round. For mages, who have a limited amount of spell points that they can spend before resting, you can't always afford to spam spells every round because you'll quickly run out of spell points and have to rest, which causes enemies in the area to respawn. And yet you kind of have to rest, especially in the beginning, to recuperate health and spell points, as well as to maximize the amount of learning you get for spells and abilities being used in combat, which puts you an infinite loop of having to rest from fighting so many enemies, which spawns more enemies which leads to more resting.

Although most random enemies are scaled up to your level, you occasionally run into problems with random fights being randomly too hard. There's a notorious glitch that somehow causes tougher enemies to spawn if you enter a zone at a lower or higher level than the developer intended, which is especially easy to trigger when leaving the starting area. Some areas are naturally meant to be a higher level, but I had a few occasions when I entered an area I'd been to previously and suddenly found myself at level 12 fighting level 16 enemies, and then had to leave the area, rest for 24 hours, and return with new, more reasonable spawns. Even when you're fighting enemies the same level as you, some enemies are just naturally more difficult than others, like when you have to fight Frightmares who spam AOE insanity and turncoat attacks on your party, or plants who spam AOE poison, nausea, blindness, and irritation. And with some areas consisting solely of narrow roads, you sometimes run into issues where multiple groups of enemies end up clumped together and you're forced to fight two or three groups at once.

Fighting pixie sprites in the treetop village of Trynton.

These kinds of fights aren't tough to reinforce level design (ie, there's really good loot hidden here so you gotta beat this tough enemy to get it) or a type of hierarchical ecosystem (ie, enemies are part of a food chain and you have to work your way up the ranks) -- they're just randomly tough. Consequently, you have to avoid a lot of fights for really no good reason; it's not like you're saving those fights for later when you know you'll be stronger because those enemies won't even be there in an hour, and you're not sneaking past enemies to reach places you shouldn't be yet because the scaling, randomized enemies make it harder to tell if an area's meant to be done early-, mid- or late-game. In Gothic, for instance, it's satisfying to sneak past tough enemies because you're deliberately sequence-breaking with a high expectation of finding end-game rewards for taking on a tough challenge early; in Wizardry 8, it doesn't feel like you're exploiting the game for your own good, but rather like you're just avoiding gameplay and skipping parts that would just be unbearable otherwise.

Wizardry 8 wears its old-school roots on its sleeve, as is evident by how brutally unforgiving it can be. This is a game where, if you make a mistake, you're going to pay for it. If a party member dies in combat, they'll stay dead unless you have an extremely rare, super-expensive resurrection powder handy. You get two of these in the starting area if you're really thorough about exploring, and if someone dies after you've used up both of those powders, then you have no choice but to load your save or continue on without one of your party members until you can afford more powder. Likewise, if a character gets poisoned and you have no more potions or spell points to cure it, then you might be forced to let them die. Most conditions will naturally wear off after a certain amount of time, but other conditions last indefinitely until they're cured; if a character is diseased long enough it'll start permanently lowering their stats, which will not revert when the disease is cured.

There's absolutely no hand-holding in this game, and this is no more evident than in the main quest, which expects you to figure out on your own what you're actually supposed to do and how to do it. The setup is so vague that it doesn't even serve as a good hook: your spaceship crashes on a foreign planet, so you just start exploring the nearby monastery, where an android gives you your main quest to "ascend from Ascension Peak," as it's written in your journal. And you just kind of stare at that going "what?" Obviously you're meant to collect the Chaos Moliri, the Astral Dominae, and the Destinae Dominus, and take them to Ascension Peak so that you can complete the rite of Ascension to reach the Cosmic Circle to become a Cosmic Lord and gain control of the Cosmic Forge, but all of that's kind of gibberish if you haven't played the previous two Wizardry games, and it's not clear in the beginning what all of that actually means, or how it applies to actual gameplay.

Talking to a T'Rang about their history.

The game expects you to figure all of this out by talking to people and asking questions. Wizardry 8 uses a classic dialogue system that doesn't give you any prompts for what to say, but rather gives you an input field where you have to type in key words for topics that you want to discuss. It's up to you to pay attention to what a character says and to pick out the key parts of what they say to get more information out of them, and to remember to bring up important topics that they may not even broach without prompting. The game's pacing suffers a bit in the beginning because it's a non-linear open-world and you have no idea where to go or what to do, so it feels like you're just aimlessly wandering around looking for hints or clues to follow, but it ends up being really satisfying once you finally start to get a grip on the world's structure and what you're supposed to be doing.

Obtaining the Destinae Dominus occupies the bulk of your time in the main quest, as it spans from the very beginning of the game to as much as three-quarters of the way through, depending on what order you do things. You learn at the start of the game that it used to be held in the monastery, but that a man named Marten stole it some hundred years ago, and it's been missing ever since. For the rest of the game you're following a trail of breadcrumbs by talking to people and finding key items, trying to piece together the history of where he went and what he did, which involves things like breaking into a fortified castle and solving puzzles to find a secret room that contains his old journal, visiting the Trynnie in the treetop village of Trynton and becoming enlightened so that you can gain the Helm of Serenity (which prevents the party from going insane when you eventually get the Destinae Dominus), and eventually tracking down Marten's ghost in the remote sea caves and convincing him to give you the Destinae Dominus.

The game does a really good job of making you feel like a lost, hopeless caravan stranded on a strange planet, and then letting you feel the sense of progression as you explore the world, become more familiar with its layout and its inhabitants, get stronger, complete quests, and start to gain mastery over and understanding of the game. It's technically an open-world, in the sense that you can go virtually anywhere at any time and complete quests in any non-linear order you want, for the most part, but it's divided into smaller regions connected by loading screens. This, I feel, gives the world a good sense of structure, with clearly defined regions that have spatial relations to other regions. It also helps to give you a sense of direction; after getting out of the monastery you really only have two directions to go in, which will progressively branch out into more and more directions, which gives you a chance to become familiar with each area before moving on to the next.

Examining a skeletal corpse in the cemetery.

Building familiarity with the world is key, because you'll frequently need to backtrack to previous areas to complete different tasks. That can be kind of annoying because of the incessant combat slowing you down, but after a certain point you unlock fast-travel options that let you warp to specific locations, and you can even learn spells that let you create your own warp points. And it really is satisfying once you reach that point when everything clicks, and you realize that, because you did this one thing over here, that means you can go back to that other place to do something new, or that this strange orb you just picked up might be what you need to power the computer at the spaceport, which you know you need to get working to find the coordinates for the Dark Savant's ship, which you need for a faction quest.

Dominus is inhabited by several different factions, many of whom you can join and work for over the course of the game. The factions consist principally of the Higardi, the human population living in Arnika; the Trynnie and Rattkin, two rodent species who live in the treetops of Trynton; the Umpani, a militant species of humanoid rhinoceri who have set up base camp near Mount Gigas; the T'Rang, an insect-like alien-looking species who live in the advanced sub-network of metallic tunnels; and the Rapax, a horned demon-looking species who've aligned themselves with the Dark Savant. Some faction interactions will be necessary as part of the main quest, but others -- like picking a side between the Umpani-T'Rang feud, or becoming a Rapax templar -- are completely optional, however some elements of the story will be a little different depending on what you do.

Quests aren't the most sophisticated thing ever, since this isn't an RPG with a bunch of dialogue options or multiple different ways to solve every quest. Rather, the quests tend to give you a vague objective (e.g., "find the coordinates to the Dark Savant's ship" or "ascend from Ascension Peak"), and you have to use your own problem-solving and detective work to figure out the solution. Finding the Dark Savant's ship coordinates, for instance, requires exploring enough to figure out that there's a computer terminal in Arnika that can read black box data from downed ships, and that there's another ship that got shot down in Bayjin Bay, and that if you can retrieve that ship's black box and bring it back to the Arnika spaceport, you can get information to feed into the scanner, which needs a spherical orb that can be found elsewhere to work. Once you get the scanner working you need to figure out the right commands to get the coordinates, and then return to the quest-giver.

Random guards patrolling the empty streets of Arnika.

There aren't a lot of NPCs in this world, mind you, which means there aren't a terribly large number of quests to complete. In fact, the world can actually feel somewhat barren and lifeless, since most of what you do in the game is exploring environments and fighting enemies. The first town, for instance -- the most populated location in the game -- only has about 10 people to talk to. These are mostly vendors and important service providers that are absolutely essential for gameplay purposes, plus a couple recruitable NPCs who're involved in a few quests, all of whom you can talk to about virtually any topic with varying degrees of useful responses. The rest of the town is completely abandoned, with dozens of empty houses and no one wandering the streets except for a few guards. The lack of ambient NPCs is explained thematically by the town evacuating after the Dark Savant landed and erected a giant tower nearby with a bomb that could destroy half the planet, but in actuality it's probably because of budget or performance issues.

Other inhabited locations have even fewer interactive NPCs -- the T'Rang headquarters has all of three NPCs in it, I believe, one of whom you can't even access until later. It kind of broke my immersion at first, feeling like I was wandering around this entire world populated seemingly only by random monster spawns, but after a while I realized the lack of other people actually contributes a lot to the game's atmosphere. Much like playing Dark Souls, there's this feeling playing Wizardry 8 where you're just on your own for so much of the game, left to your own devices to survive in a foreign land. The world may feel kind of desolate and barren, but that ends up being part of its charm. In fact, exploring the world actually does feel a lot like Dark Souls, in terms of the way the world is designed and how you have to poke around and figure things out for yourself, except the environments are a little more spacious and open.

The game is definitely at its best when you're in structured areas like the monastery, or Marten's Bluff, or the sea caves, or any of the other locations that function sort of like quasi-dungeons. These are the type of areas where you have to explore a more complex layout, searching for items and solutions to puzzles and the like, which is far more engaging, I find, than wandering around a wilderness area or walking down roads dodging random encounters. It kind of sucks, therefore, that after escaping the monastery it takes a while before you get to the next "dungeon." I was absolutely loving the game during the monastery, and then the experience started to go rapidly downhill as I got stuck fighting endless groups of random enemies as I wandered around open areas and linear roads trying to figure out what to do next. That was when I almost quit, but fortunately I stuck through it and started enjoying the game a lot more once I got back to the better parts of its gameplay.

Trying not to fall into the deadly pit of lava.

While Wizardry 8 feels like an old-school game with more modern features and presentation, it certainly doesn't have the polished feel of modern games. Even for its time, having been released in 2001, Wizardry 8 feels a little rough around the edges, in large part because the developer, SirTech, was running out of money and in desperate need to finish the game. There are several quests and events that they obviously started programming but then never finished; every now and then you pick up a quest that you can never really complete (in one case, because the quest-giver simply disappears from the game), or characters say they're going to do something and then never do. On a few occasions there are quest solutions built in to the game without the actual quest ever being given, like if you bring an NPC an item then you'll get the rewards, but there's absolutely no dialogue exchanged before or after, and so there's no way of knowing you're supposed to bring that item to him unless you use a guide or use trial-and-error spamming items on every NPC.

That unnecessarily obscure design principle (unintentional, in that case) applies to the game's hidden easter eggs, the so-called "retro dungeons." These are hidden dungeons inspired by the classic wire-frame design of older Wizardry games, that you can access by pressing runes in certain areas and then bringing a specific item to a specific location. You then warp into one of three retro dungeons, where you have to follow a series of grid-based rooms and hallways mapping the layout yourself (the automap doesn't work), fighting monsters, opening doors, and navigating warp tiles to reach a boss and find the exit. These retro dungeons are an amusing distraction, but they're ultimately pointless, and it's kind of perplexing how impossibly obscure they are to find without a guide. You get absolutely no indication what pressing the runes is actually supposed to do, and there's no way to know what item you're supposed to use to actually trigger the dungeons, short of carrying every item in the game with you and trying every single one of them.

Some of the controls are still a little cumbersome and obtuse, so you're better off remapping keybindings at the very start, and it takes some studying of the user-interface to figure out what exactly everything does, and how you're supposed to do things. It took me a moment to figure out how to use items, for instance, because the usual double-click, right-click, and click-and-drag-to-portrait methods don't work. Rather, you have to click the "use item" button in the bottom bar and then click on the item. It all makes sense, but you have to familiarize yourself with everything. That's pretty easy to do, fortunately, because of the abundance of tool-tips that let you know what everything does if you hover your mouse over it. For things like attributes, skills, items, monsters, and so on, you can right-click on them to get a pop-up window that shows all of their stats and explains exactly what they do.

The inventory screen.

As an old-school RPG everything you do comes down to how good your characters' stats are. Mages, for instance, must train in one of four different spellbooks, and also with individual realms within those spellbooks. A mage, for instance, would need to train with the wizardry spellbook in order to learn higher-level spells, and his proficiency in the fire realm determines how many spellpoints he has for casting fire spells, as well as his success rate at casting fire spells. A character's mythology skill determines how good they are at identifying enemies to know their health values, attacks, and resistances, while a character's artifacts skill determines how good they are at identifying items to know their stats and what they actually do. Even things like picking locks and disarming traps, which have their own fairly decent mini-games, ultimately come down to your character's skill level.

Picking locks is relatively simple, and simply involves clicking on tumblers with a random chance, based on your character's skill, that that tumbler will stay in place without dislodging others. There's no player skill involved whatsoever, which I appreciate, but the whole thing is just a matter of clicking things enough times until random chance lets you succeed, which, given enough time, means you can eventually pick any lock if you're lucky. And that can be pretty boring just sitting there for a minute or two mindlessly clicking things waiting for random success. Disarming traps is much more interesting, however; mechanically, all you're doing is pressing the correct buttons from eight different choices, but thematically you're using process of elimination to determine what type of trap you're dealing with so that you know whether you need to disable the spring, or cut a wire, and so on. Like picking locks, it's not super complicated, but it does take just a little bit of brain power to solve, and it makes you feel a little more involved in the process.

Wizardry 8 has a lot of great mechanical depth to it, with one of the most robust party creation systems and one of the best implementations of turn-based combat in any RPG. The story, quests, and adventure elements are a bit more subtle, but they also offer plenty to enjoy in terms of the satisfaction that comes from using your own problem-solving skills to figure out how everything works and what you have to do to solve everything. It's not an RPG about selecting dialogue options and having multiple solutions to every quest, but the process of getting from the beginning to the end of different quests is always an adventure. It falls very much into the same category of games like Fallout 1+2, Gothic 1+2, Arcanum, Arx Fatalis, and so on, in terms of RPG systems and world design, so if you enjoyed any of those games then Wizardry 8 is definitely worth checking out. It's also a good example of how older 80s and 90s computer-RPGs used to be, except done up in a much more modern, playable skin. It's just a shame that the excessive combat almost ruins the whole experience, and that SirTech basically ran out of time and money to properly finish and polish everything.

[Note: I didn't take my own screenshots for this game, so all the images in this review are from the Wizardry 8 section of HardcoreGaming101's retrospective on the Wizardry series, a highly educational read that I recommend checking out for more historical context on this game and the series in general.]

Pathologic: The Marble Nest - Demo Impressions

The original Pathologic, released back in 2005 by Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge, is one of the most unique and interesting games ever made. I reviewed it five years ago and had a lot of high praise for it. The legacy of the original game is so strong that Ice-Pick Lodge took to Kickstarter a few years ago planning a remake that would fix some of the original's critical problems while re-imagining and improving many of the story elements and gameplay mechanics. As part of the process in developing the new version, they've recently released a free playable demo called The Marble Nest, which consists of a stand-alone scenario meant to showcase some of the game's more prominent gameplay mechanisms while condensing the full game experience down to two hours. 

For the uninitiated, Pathologic is a type of survival-horror adventure game played in first-person, in which you take the role of one of three different healers who have arrived in a strange town with a bunch of bizarre and mysterious customs just as a deadly plague breaks out. The game takes place over the course of 12 days, with the town changing dramatically as the plague spreads and more and more people become infected. Each day comes with a main quest that must be completed while the clock continues to tick, leaving you a limited amount of time each day to complete your tasks. Meanwhile, you have to manage your own condition on various statistical gauges, which involves scrounging the environment for resources and manipulating a fickle economy where sometimes your only hope for survival is to sell your only weapon for a few slices of bread.

The Marble Nest maintains all of these ideas, but trims some of the more complicated survival systems and economy management down while putting you in a scenario that spans only one day. In it, you wake up some time after the plague has already wiped out most of the population, after your final quarantine zone has been breached. With seemingly all hope lost, you watch as the city collapses around you, and then the game flashes back to 14 hours prior, giving you a chance to possibly prevent the catastrophe from happening, although you'll most likely fail and everyone will die horribly, as is the true spirit of Pathologic. 

Wandering the city streets with the Polyhedron looming in the distance.

Described by the designers as a "mood-piece created to acquaint you with the world of Pathologic," they warn that the demo doesn't include all of the gameplay mechanisms that will be in the full game (due out in November 2017, supposedly) and that it is very much a pre-alpha build. There's obviously a lot of missing polish that they didn't put into the demo (doors don't even animate when they open or close), but it already looks, feels, and sounds leagues better than the original game did. I guess that's to be expected, considering the original is about 12 years old at this point, and the original was never very good in the first place. The interface is sleek and intuitive, no longer the cumbersome mess that leaves you confused about how to perform basic game functions, dialogue is properly translated into real, sensible English, and the visuals look much more detailed and realistic while still retaining the same style and appearance of the original.

In terms of gameplay, The Marble Nest is basically a two-hour scenario spanning the course of one day, in which you run around a small district of the town talking to NPCs, making decisions, trying to save people, trying to maintain order as the district falls into chaos, and trying to find out who and where the carrier is who reportedly broke the quarantine so that you can keep the plague from spreading. This all plays out in modified real time, with a clock constantly ticking the minutes away from morning to evening as you race against time trying to fix all of the problems that seem to crop up all around you, and trying to find a way to avoid the inevitable fate that leads to your own weary demise, as is hinted by the en media res intro sequence before the flashback starts, in which Death himself pays you a visit with the city in flames and the corpses piling up to ask: "Are you ready to die?"

A sample dialogue hinting at the nature of the game's structure.

The demo manages to be as tense and stressful as the original game but without the slow burn of having to put in the strenuous, meticulous work of surviving in this harsh, decrepit town for 30-40 hours. All of the usual survival mechanics are still in place -- you have a bunch of statistical meters measuring things like your health, stamina, fatigue, hunger, thirst, immunity, and infection level, all of which require different items and actions to treat and maintain, but you start out in good enough condition and there's not enough time for any of these to really become an issue, unless you've never played the original and thus aren't familiar with how the systems work, then I could maybe see infection or hunger catching up to you. There's also no combat, from what I saw of the demo, which is fine because it was only a minor part of the original game.

The feeling of chaos from the original game, of things spiraling out of control as the situation rapidly deteriorates, is definitely present in the demo. Many of your assistants have abandoned their posts, leaving you short-handed and having to take care of more stuff on your own, and town officials have fallen into a type of insanity, issuing orders for the city guard that undermine your previous orders because they deliriously believe everything is fine. You had previously quarantined refugees with suspicious symptoms to the cathedral, only to find that everyone has been let out; the townsfolk get restless and start raiding the local shop for supplies, which you had ordered closed down; factory workers start talking about breaking into houses and killing people with symptoms to stop the plague. Eventually people start taking to the streets, attacking each other and setting the town's signal fires aflame, and despite all of your best efforts you're basically powerless to stop it.

As the plague starts taking over the final quarantine district.

As you roam the streets you hear about rumors from your assistants ("there are a bunch of kids hanging out in the courtyard looking into windows," "a woman down the street says her husband is ill," and so on), which get marked on your map as places of interest. You can also stumble into scenes that unfold all on their own, without any kind of prompting, and stop to investigate or possibly interfere, if you desire. At each of these events, you're usually given the option to talk to the people involved and make some kind of decision: do you let the looters into the store because its supplies could come in handy, or tell them to stay back and station a guard there to maintain order? When two people show signs of illness that don't necessarily correlate to the plague, do you keep them locked up or let them out? When a dying man tells you not to heal him, do you respect his wishes or administer the treatment and save his life?

All of these decisions impact the way the scenario will unfold; for the most part, they're just thematic, cosmetic changes, but they do a good job of making the game world feel more alive because you really get to see and feel the city descending into madness and despair. It also really adds to the thematic immersion, where it gives you this feeling of control, of making you think you have the power to prevent things and save people when in reality the situation is over your head and all you can really do is slow the bleeding. Some of the events (and your decisions within them) affect which of the four endings you get, with some being distinctly better than others. Failure is a definite possibility, and since there's no saving or loading to correct mistakes, this is the type of thing where you just have to act on instinct -- and quickly, for that matter -- and hope for the best, living (or dying) with whatever consequences arise from your actions.

The inventory screen, carrying a human heart in my pocket.

Unlike the original game, The Marble Nest can be somewhat aimless at times. In the original you received a letter from important NPCs every morning that gave you a clear objective to accomplish each day; in this demo, you have to decide for yourself what's important and what's not, because you might not have enough time to do everything. That's certainly a good thing because it forces you to make decisions and get into the role of Daniil Dankovsky a little more, but if you manage to complete everything in time, like I did, then you're stuck awkwardly wandering around with no purpose, just killing time until some kind of event happens or until the time limit finally runs out to let you trigger the ending. 

The endings (and the whole premise in general) can be rather poetic and open to interpretation. It's the type of thing meant to make you think about your own beliefs and understanding of the world. This comes into play with many of your decisions, obviously, but especially so when it comes to Death's visitation and his central question, "are you ready to die," and as you try to piece together what's actually going on in this world and what the significance of everything is actually supposed to be. It certainly has an intriguing mystique about it, and it does get you thinking, which is always good. 

I had a lot of praise and admiration for the original game when I reviewed it back in 2012, but the original is not a game I can easily recommend on account of its various problems (though I hear the Pathologic Classic HD release a few years ago improves some things a bit, such as the shoddy translation). This demo for the upcoming remake, subtitled The Marble Nest, is a game I can easily recommend, especially if anything I said about the original game or this demo has intrigued you. It definitely captures that unique atmosphere and feeling of the original game, that feeling of death and decay as a city steadily succumbs to the effects of the plague. Its two-hour length and streamlined gameplay make it easy enough to get into that I think just about anyone would be able to enjoy it. Hopefully this is but a mere taste of what we can expect from the remake when it finally comes out. 

Titan Quest: The "Neapolitan Ice Cream" of Action-RPGs

Titan Quest is a hack-n-slash action-RPG based on ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese mythology. It seemed to fly under the radar back in 2006, and yet somehow, for some reason, publisher THQ decided to release a massive free update for it 10 years later in 2016. Dubbed the "Anniversary Edition," this new version is a complete overhaul of the original game with performance tweaks, improved functionality, new features, and better balancing while also throwing in the Immortal Throne expansion. The core gameplay follows the traditions of Diablo, where you work your way through a series of levels fighting enemies, collecting randomized loot, and investing points in skill trees when you level up, all in an overhead axonometric view with a mouse-driven interface and real-time combat.

Action-RPGs aren't usually my cup of tea. I played some of the original Titan Quest back in 2007 (the "Gold Edition" box is still sitting on my shelf) as well as a few others in the genre (Diablo, Diablo 3, Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege 2, Path of Exile), but in each case I only played for a few hours and then lost interest. Titan Quest: Anniversary Edition is the first of this type of game that I've actually played to completion, and even then, I still technically haven't completed it because I stopped shortly after finishing the base game's campaign, having no desire to continue further with the expansion content. That should give you a pretty clear idea of how I felt about the game: I enjoyed it enough to play it through until the end, but not enough to keep going when it tried to get me to stick around for more.

Since I'm not a super-seasoned aciton-RPG person I can't get into much detail about how Titan Quest stacks up to other games in the genre, but even with my limited familiarity with these games I still find it difficult to talk about Titan Quest as its own entity because it seems like such a bog-standard, formulaic action-RPG that most of what I'd be saying about it could apply to all action-RPGs in general. I feel like this is the type of game that I could just say "it's Diablo but set in ancient Greece, Egypt, and China" and you would intuitively know if you'd like it or not. Still, I have some observations that might help shed some more light on the game and perhaps explain the Neapolitan ice cream comparison in the title.

Fighting cyclopes while ascending Mount Olympus.

Titan Quest takes place over the course of three acts, with the first act being set in Greece, the second act in Egypt, and the third act in China. You play as some random dude or dudette starting on the outskirts of town, helping a farmer whose livestock are being attacked by satyrs. As you head into town you learn that monsters have been unleashed on the world, and that there's a greater plot by some mysterious figures to release the Titans from their imprisonment so that they can destroy the world. The rest of the game is a matter of following leads from historic location to historic location across Greece, Egypt, and eventually China en route to fighting a Titan as the final boss.

I can't comment on the story because frankly I did not pay attention to it. There's a ton of dialogue in this game (or more accurately, monologues, since you never engage in conversation yourself -- characters just speak at you), with quest-givers offering backstories for their quests and other NPCs who exist to dump mythological lore on you, but after the first 30 minutes I stopped caring and starting skipping all the dialogue. I'm sure you can learn a lot about history and ancient cultures by playing this game, and maybe there's some hidden depth in the main story and it's not just a cliche "bad guys want to unleash devastating monsters on the world, you must stop them" plot, but none of it seemed to impact the gameplay in any way since everything is just an excuse to make you fight through levels to find an item, kill an enemy, or talk to an NPC.

Pulling the camera down to get a closer look at an NPC.

The game's pacing is mind-numbingly slow to begin with, and sitting through long monologues makes the game feel even slower. Movement is slow, combat is slow, progression is slow, everything is slow. You're always moving forward to new areas, fighting new types of enemies, finding new loot, and improving your character through skill trees, but it takes so long to make any kind of significant progress. Most of the loot drops you come across are completely worthless, either because they're weak "common" stuff or they don't fit your build, and so there's usually a lot of time between equipment upgrades, and when you level up you're often just improving your stats or skills by a few meager percentage points. This is a game where you can play for a few hours in one session and come away not feeling any stronger than when you started. 

One of the best aspects of the "Anniversary Edition" is that it speeds up some of the animations to make the game a little bit faster than normal, and it takes it two steps further by adding a "game speed" option to the settings menu. With that, you can bump the game up to "fast" or "very fast." "Fast" gives the game a nice boost, and "very fast" is useful for moments when you're just running long distances to reach somewhere, but can make combat a little too fast. With the game on "very fast" I occasionally found myself going from full health to near death in one second, and so there's not always enough time to react to powerful spells or a sudden change of enemy tactics. If you're going to play Titan Quest, then I'd say you absolutely have to play with it on "fast," bare minimum. 

Combat is pretty slow and simple, especially in the beginning; you're typically only fighting a few enemies at a time, most of which are basic trash mobs that simply wear you down over time, and so you just kind of lazily click on things and hold down the left mouse button until everything dies, then press a button to automatically pick up all the gold and potions, and then slowly wander to the next cluster of enemies to do it all over again. Active skills can give you more things to do in a fight, but due to a mix-up with my friend, with whom I was cooping the game, I ended up going a full summoner route, which may be the most boring thing ever because my summons did all the work for me automatically. It quickly reached a point where, any time I was playing the game, I'd put on a TV show or listen to a podcast, and probably pay more attention to the show than the game.

Fighting undead in a tomb somewhere. 

I really didn't have to pay attention to what I was doing because the game is so easy for so much of the main campaign that you can breeze through everything with minimal effort. I made it all the way to the third town, for instance, without investing a single skill point, improving any of my attributes, or even picking a class. Once I did all that, I became practically invincible, easily killing everything before it could so much as dent my or my summons' health while I sat on literally hundreds of healing potions. And then, for whatever reason, the difficulty suddenly spiked so high in the middle of the third act that the boring tedium of lazily killing everything in sight turned into boring tedium kiting circles around enemies popping potions and waiting for the cooldown on my summons to recharge because they (and I) were getting destroyed in seconds. So the difficulty balancing hits extreme ends of the spectrum, starting out way too easy and suddenly becoming obnoxiously hard, while never hitting a desirable sweet spot in the middle.

Quests are literally straightforward; every quest that you pick up always points to the next area of the game, and since you follow an extremely linear path from start to finish you conveniently pick up and complete every single quest along the way. You can completely ignore the quest monologue and never read the journal entry to know what your objective is supposed to be, and still complete the quest as long as you go everywhere possible before moving on to the next area. You never make any choices during a quest, and there's never any risk of failing or missing a quest. The same holds true for exploration as well; there's little thought or effort involved because you just mindlessly follow your progress on the automap and make sure you don't leave any unexplored areas before moving on.

All of that sounds like pretty stark criticism, but it's not all bad. In fact, the game has some nice, clever things going on that are worth praising. There's a sensible logic to the way loot drops, for instance; enemies actually equip the items they use and drop them when they die, so if you're an archer and you're looking to get sweet archer gear you're better off fighting enemies that are obviously shooting bows and arrows at you, as opposed to a group of mages. Dropped items can't be examined or picked up unless you toggle their text display with a button, which is nice for cutting down on screen clutter and keeping all the loot out of your way when you're clicking to move around or to attack an enemy. Additionally, you can toggle different loot filters so that only loot of certain rarities and above will ever be displayed -- again, highly useful for cutting down on the clutter since you don't even have to see all the crappy "broken" and "common" items you'll never pick up.

So many crappy items that aren't worth picking up.

Titan Quest uses a dual class system; at level one you pick a starting class from one of nine choices (hunter, rogue, defender, warrior, necromancer, druid, storm mage, earth mage, and dream seer), and then at level eight you pick a second class from the remaining choices. For the rest of the game you can put points into one or both skill trees, which allows for some fun, creative hybridization and unique build diversity, and each tree has several worthwhile options to choose from every tier. But of course, you don't get enough skill points over the course of the game to be a master of everything, so it forces you to specialize and really think about what skills you're taking, and how you plan for the long haul.

I also really like the ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese setting. It seems like 90% of the games in this genre are medieval, sword-and-sorcery fantasy themes, with only slight variations within existing archetypes of that genre, and even fewer that try to do something completely different. Titan Quest stands out as a rare example of the latter, and it's just such a refreshing change of pace to play one of these types of games in a colorful, brightly lit environment. The three regions are all strongly themed after their own mythologies: in Greece you go to the Parthenon in Athens and fight minotaurs, gorgons, and cyclopes; in Egypt you go to the pyramids of Giza and fight mummies, scorpions, and dunewraiths; in China you go to the Great Wall and fight tigermen, dragonoids, and terracotta warriors. Each area looked and felt dramatically different from the last, and I really liked seeing how the designers tied each areas' ancient mythologies into the gameplay and aesthetics.

Fighting terracotta warriors in a Chinese village.

My criticisms may seem to outnumber and outweigh my praises, but none of the game's issues ever really bothered me, except for maybe that obnoxious difficulty spike near the end when I was ready to be done with the game. For the most part Titan Quest is a relaxing activity where you can shut your brain off and just play a game without burning yourself out. This is the type of game you play after a long day of work when you don't have the energy to play something more intense, and indeed that's basically how (and why) I kept playing -- because it was a nice and simple game I could play late at night when I didn't feel like stressing myself out with the survival-horror tension of Resident Evil 7, or piecing together the story of SOMA, or the intense action of Serious Sam, or the mental aerobics of managing my party in Wizardry 8. It seems completely average gameplay-wise, but it's serviceable enough, and there's enough interesting things going on with its unique theming that it kept me playing all the way through the base game.

Titan Quest is a bit like Neapolitan ice cream, in the sense that it offers simple, familiar flavors -- it doesn't do anything too crazy or exciting to mix up the standard formula, but it gives you variety in one package, and sometimes that simple combination of familiar flavors is all you really need.