TITAN QUEST II

The Spartans have annoyed Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, and now the ancient world is filled with monsters and undead.

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NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE TBC

DEVELOPER Grimlore Games

PUBLISHER THQ Nordic

LINK steam.pm/app/1154030/

Unfortunately, this demonic deity is after your head, too. No need to stress, though: Titan Quest II (the sequel to 2006's mythological ARPG) is a pretty chill time, and it just snuck out in Early Access.

It might be considerably prettier than its predecessor—with the caveat that it's visually a touch conservative—but stepping into the sandals of my Greek hero felt like travelling back in time to a simpler era, when you could enjoy an ARPG without intense number crunching, theorycrafting or engaging in live service systems.

You whack monsters. Or stab them. Or turn them to ash with a lightning bolt. Then you snatch your rewards and maybe level up, where you can drip points into a flexible skill system. And then you just keep doing it.

BEAUTIFUL SIMPLICITY

At a time when ARPGs are getting more complex and life-consuming, Titan Quest II is a weird novelty, eschewing the huge skill trees of Path of Exile and Last Epoch, the MMO structure of Lost Ark, or the billions of currencies and MTX nonsense that most ARPGs are drowning in.

Even its most noteworthy feature feels subdued compared to the competition. Like the first Titan Quest, you create your own class by combining two different masteries. At the moment, you can mess around with Earth, Storm, Warfare, and Rogue masteries, mixing and matching the skills contained within them.

There's one wrinkle that the sequel throws into the mix, though: each skill can be augmented with modifiers when you level it up. This is something we've already seen in other ARPGs, however, including Diablo IV, though I should add that there's a decent number of modifiers, some of which change the skills they interact with.