Titan Quest II snuck up out of nowhere and surprised us all. The sequel to the 2006 classic may have nothing to do with the original developers, nor even the original publishers, but after spending a few hours with the game I’m left in no doubt that it understands the spirit of what it’s trying to recreate. It’s just that this Early Access release isn’t close to optimized, and lacks some incredibly obvious quality-of-life features.
The original Titan Quest was released midway through the twelve-year gap between Diablo II and Diablo III, and even three years before the release of Torchlight. While hardcore action-RPG players had just been given 2005’s Fate, the market was so very open for a more immediately approachable Diablo-like, and Iron Lore Entertainment’s Greek (and Egyptian) mythology game perfectly fit the bill. It’s super-low-key approach to the genre meant you weren’t worrying about min-maxing your intricate build, but were far more likely to just be methodically click-click-clicking your way through its luscious lands. Not quite an idle game (those were years from being a thing), Titan Quest allowed a nonchalance in its delivery of constant dopamine hits as you incessantly progressed, whether geographically or in the quality of your equipment. And this, from my admittedly brief time so far with Titan Quest II, seems to be entirely understood. In a lot of ways–and ways that leave me optimistic despite my laundry list of complaints–it’s the sequel you would want.
Then, on the other hand, the game is causing my GPU to be transformed into a thermo-nuclear bomb, forcing me to turn it off lest I blow up my entire town.
A lack of optimization is perhaps typical for an Early Access game, but Titan Quest II‘s crappy framerates and attempts at arson via my PC feel a bit too much. More frustrating to me are the obvious quality-of-life features that you just expect any game in this genre to already have in place, like, I dunno, being able to rebind controller buttons, or not have to hold down a key to be able to compare inventory items. It’s also not great that trying to use a ladder can see you endlessly spinning on the spot with no choice but to reload.
Titan Quest II starts exactly right. The opening of the original Titan Quest was so idyllic, such a perfect bucolic setting, that I didn’t want to leave it. This sequel 19 years on seems to have fully understood this, and offers something that evokes the very same sense of serenity and safety. You stand atop a cliff, looking out over the gorgeous blue sea on the coast, a ruined building below, a shipwreck to your right, but it’s all so peaceful and pretty. However, you’re quickly urged on by another character to hurry and help, as a gryphon is attacking the nearby town, so off you go.
After this, there’s definitely nothing that’ll especially surprise you if you’re familiar with action-RPGs. You left click to move, right click to attack, and enemies and items will drop you new equipment. After some inventory Tetris, you compare what you’ve picked up with what you’ve already got, swap it out, and then find a merchant on whom to dump the rest. And repeat. And that’s enough! That’s the joy of this genre, just enough to keep you distracted, ideally accompanied by a favorite podcast. However, for min-maxxers, TQ2 does go the extra mile, with intricate information about your current build, allowing far more in-depth development should that be your thing; for everyone else, you can just make sure numbers go up, and when you gain a new level, add the abilities that sound the most interesting to you.
Like in the original, there are various Masteries to choose from, although at this point in the sequel’s Early Access they number just four, all familiar. There’s Earth, Lightning, Warfare, and Rogue, and alongside these there’s Core, which lets you boost your main attack in various ways. Then there’s the usual stats to push upward as you go. However, this time out it’s all far more complicated than it should be, with each Mastery filled with a squillion different skills, and each of those skills then upgraded themselves with micro-skills, and given the result is just hitting something harder, or making lightning zap the enemies, it doesn’t need to be anywhere this muddled. The tutorials aren’t great at explaining it all at this point either, although I just sort of guessed and things seemed fine.
There are a couple of more significant changes. Firstly, there’s now a dash, which makes for more interesting moments in combat when you’re being targeted by an attack that’s focused on a particular spot on the ground. And perhaps slightly controversially, the game has done away with proper potions, instead having sort of magic ones that refill as a result of your combat. Fight more, and you can heal more. It’s odd. I think I preferred just being able to buy a hundred health potions and not having to think about it. Along with these, there are little details that felt very positive; I was especially pleased with how arrows pierce enemies and can be used to take down groups charging in a line. Or the way a portal spawns nearby where you die, so you don’t have the misery of trudging all the way back to where you fell.
I was happy! I found ranged attacks far more viable here than they were in the original, which is lovely, and I was happily switching between bow and club depending upon the circumstances, walloping everything and scooping up loot. But, the more I played, the more something felt off. And it’s not just the shitty framerates. But it is also the shitty framerates.
Let’s get the tech stuff out of the way, as this aspect is likely to be fixed the most quickly. The game ran for me at around 40FPS, even when I’d lowered the settings from its recommendations, and even running it in a too-small window. Worse, that fluctuated, sometimes 55, sometimes 35, and all that jarring change made it feel clumsy. And remember, this is a fixed-camera isometric RPG. It’s also pretty astonishing that a PC game from a big-name publisher released in 2025 wouldn’t have sensible graphics settings, but TQ2‘s are a mess. I have an ultra-wide monitor, and was only able to choose between 3440×1440 in fullscreen (which I wouldn’t expect to be optimized for just yet) or the deeply obscure 2048×1152 in a window, which is tiny on this screen. There was no option for a bog-standard 2560×1440, which is pretty dreadful, especially since it clearly can run in those higher resolutions. This feels pretty amateurish.
That leaden feeling to movement, likely caused by framerate issues, is I think the most off-putting aspect at the moment. But there’s more insidious stuff, like the weird way loot drops from all the wrong places. A real joy of Titan Quest is that enemies dropped what they had. If you killed a boar, the best you’d get is a boar hide. But if your enemy was equipped with a shield and axe, there was a strong chance of finding those on the floor after it was dead. But here, I watched the intense silliness of a giant eagle dropping a pair of shoes as it died. I also saw snakes flinging out gloves as they flopped to the ground. I’m not a fully qualified herpetologist, but I’m pretty sure they have little use for gloves. No, it doesn’t matter, but it’s kind of crap.
Then there’s just inexplicable choices, like needing to hold down Alt to compare items in your inventory with those that are equipped. There’s no circumstance ever where you don’t want the comparison to pop up, which is why all games like this do it by default (or offer a toggle for the mad people). Here, when you’re trying to sort through your junk to sell to a merchant, you have to tie your fingers in knots holding down Alt to compare, the Shift to sell, and it’s all far more of a fiddle than could possibly be needed. Why no toggle? Who lives like that? Then there’s the inability to rebind controller inputs, and the astonishingly hard boss fights, and maybe most of all, the lack of a sense of place.
It says it’s set in ancient Greece, but if that’s true, why are there ruins everywhere? The developers know they didn’t start out that way, right? There’s a lovely intro video which explains how Nemesis is out of control, and the threads of Fate have been corrupted, and someone has to stop her, but then absolutely no sense of how that links to who you are and why you’re there. Everyone else seems to know who you are, but you don’t! You just start off with someone shouting about a gryphon and you just get on with it, but with no grounding. At least in Titan Quest, this blank slate start was understood by your having just arrived on a boat, with NPCs frantically getting you up to date.
I dunno. I think I’m perhaps being overly fussy, and will likely get over all of this as soon as I can run the game at a steady framerate and a sensible scale without personally accelerating global climate change. I actually really like a lot about this, and think that with a few patches, it’ll be an Early Access game worth investing in. Sure, more Masteries would be good, but they’ve put in the most popular here, so you’ve plenty to get on with.
It’s also worth noting that Titan Quest isn’t Diablo, and was never trying to be. This isn’t about rushing through the actual game in order to reach end-game sicko content–it’s about enjoying the journey. And it’s incredibly refreshing to pick up an ARPG that isn’t bloated with live-service faff of the sort that makes games like Path of Exile 2 feel so incredibly inaccessible to me. I feel like Titan Quest 2 might be exactly the game I’ve been wanting ever since the last time Torchlight was any good, and it just needs a little bit of work before it can deliver it.
For now, you may want to hold off a couple of weeks while it gets its shit together. That it’s only $24 really does make a massive difference, it should be said, and once that sluggish feel is gone, I’ll likely be mainlining the game.
