It's quite clear from the start that the makers of Titan Quest are not only huge fans of the film Clash Of The Titans but also hugely respectful of the infamous Diablo games. With Titan Quest, Iron Lore have tried to take what's great about Diablo and transfer it to the mythical lands of Greece, Egypt and Asia, lands full of walking skeletons, rabid wolves, wanton zombies and the one and only Medusa, to name but a few. What Iron Lore hasn't taken into account however is that Diablo is a very, very old game and that times change - fast.

For those of you who don't know anything about Greek mythology, all the Greek gods like Zeus were mere mortals until they attained their god status by defeating and imprisoning their elders, a group of gods know as the Titans. Titan Quest begins with these rather pissed-off Titans escaping from prison and wreaking havoc on the mortal men who worship the Olympian gods such as Zeus. You are cast into the game as a warrior whose task it is to stop these Titans from obliterating everything in their paths.

When you start the game you can create your hero by choosing a name, gender and the colour of your character's tunic. When you consider recent character customisation in RPGs such as Oblivion, where you can choose everything from the curl of your character's mouth to the gradient of their nose, Titan Quest really lets itself down right from the offset. Once your character is ready, you're propelled into ancient Greece. The view is top-down, very similar to Diablo, as is the gameplay. Using a very mouse-heavy interface, you can explore countryside, farmlands, forests, caves, dungeons and all the fare you'd expect from an RPG of this vein. By clicking on the landscape you navigate your character across the scene and subsequent clicks allow you to speak to NPCs or attack enemies as they appear on the screen. It's pretty repetitive, as every quest involves slaughtering lots of enemies, so you'll find yourself clicking through all the dialogue, as it's basically just padding to another kill some more bad guys mission.

The game features a huge variety of mythical creatures and it throws them at you early and often. Within the first few hours, you'll be crossing swords with satyrs, centaurs, harpies and gorgons. There're also more advanced enemies, who hurl magic at you from a distance, whilst their underlings tear at you from close range. Combat on the whole can be rather frustrating, as you have to keep clicking on an enemy to hit it each time, instead of being able to click once and watch the action unfold. There are no complex tactics on show here, as all you need to do is keep an eye on your health to stay alive. As you progress and kill more and more beasties you gain experience points, which can progress you in level. Every time you go up a level, you receive points that you can allocate to character skills such as Strength and Intelligence and also to magical skills that you can build up over time. So you can boost your frame as a fighter but then also unlock a fireball spell, allowing you to hack and burn all at once. Whether you choose to specialise in fighting or magic, there's plenty of customisation available and reams of spells and special abilities at the player's disposal.

With each creature you kill or chest you open, you gain more and more loot. In Titan Quest you'll pick up a massive amount of weapons, armour, potions, gold and magical items. When you pick something up it goes into a flat grid view of your inventory. Each item takes up a certain space in that flat grid, but as you pick things up, the game doesn't optimise where the items are placed in the grid. This can be frustrating, as you have to keep pausing the game so you can rearrange all the items, almost like a puzzle. To its credit, the game does actually colour code items to help you work out what's worth keeping and what isn't, but still it only slightly alleviates the hassle.

The story of Titan Quest would be relatively compelling if you didn't have to wait hours to hear it. It is conveyed by the NPCs, who speak very slowly for each quest, and the script of what they say flows just as slowly, so you'll find yourself blanking the story just so you can get on with playing the game. That said, if you're a fan of all this mythical stuff then you'll probably hang on every word and love it. Titan Quest is unbelievably linear but it's also unbelievably huge; on default difficulty it'd take you over forty hours to play through the game. The game also comes with a very powerful mod tool that lets you create your own custom maps and quests. This is a very nice touch, even if the mod tool does require you to be of a reasonable technical prowess, otherwise you'd never have a chance of working it out. Nevertheless, for the technical bods it does offer a great extension to the game and allows people to play Titan Quest even after they've completed the game.

The game presents itself in huge, uninterrupted segments of land, with oodles of nooks and crannies to meander into, full of side-quests and mortals in need of your help. There's an impressive level of detail on show, such as tall grass swaying as you run into its midst, or the condensation rising off the pillars of an ancient ruin. The enemies look fantastic as well, carrying off all the splendour of the tales we're familiar with from the films like Clash Of The Titans and Jason and the Argonauts. When you're playing the game, it feels like you're reliving those lazy Sunday afternoons when you were a kid watching such movies and sipping on your Soda Stream cola. [I loved those movies as a kid; Ray Harryhausen, I bow down to your claymation skills! Fable-Ed]. Great ambient sounds complement the beautifully rendered environments, with every weapon clash and spell blast bursting through your speakers, although the voice acting is woefully inadequate to say the least; you notice the same actors voicing different parts, even throughout the first two hours of gameplay.

Titan Quest is a good game, but not a great game. If this had been released three of four years ago it would have been heralded as a real contender for PC game of the year. However, as times have moved on and 3D RPGs such as Oblivion have taken the gaming world by storm, top-down RPGs like Titan Quest were always going to suffer. Having said that, for those who realty dig the Diablo and Baldur's Gate vibe, this one is right up your street. Great value with over forty hours of gameplay and plenty of stuff to keep you playing into the wee small hours, Titan Quest offers some unabashed old-school fun, but if you've got a 360, buy Oblivion and watch your leisure time drip away to nothing instead.

Reviewed by Ross Alexander for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).