The Diablo 3 that Blizzard that never made. Great game, worthy of praise, but not amazing or new.
For those who are unfamiliar with the Diablo style “action-RPG”, here is a basic description. It is not a RPG, don’t expect amazing story unfolding before you, or interesting dialogs and conversation trees with NPCs, don’t expect an interesting world, full of guilds, people going about their lives, don’t expect inventing potions etc. TQ is action , which means it concentrates on pure combat, both melee and ranged. There is no amazing skills with the mouse or the keyboard, just click to kill ( and click to talk and click to pick up items), and there is plenty to kill; hence the tag of “click-feast”. So what’s so good about just clicking and killing, well, the answer is you get to build the ultimate killing machine.
TQ is about creating a character which can basically kill all beasts as quickly as possible, with weapons of choice, skills and special items which add bonuses to your attack or defense. Unlike “normal RPGs”, TQ is quick paced, in less than ten seconds, pick up another weapon, whack a few enemies, and decide if the weapon is worth keeping. There’s lots of weapons and items and skills such as armor, shields, special bonus enhancing stones etc, which boost you attack speed, damage, defense, or attributes. This means there is many many possible ways to tweak your killing machine, and it is a constant and fast pace. You will always find a weapon that is slightly better, in damage it does, or speed, or range, but also items which are slightly just beyond you characters attributes, eg. Not enough strength, or dexterity or level, which makes you think about your character planning. So everything to improve your character is right before your eyes, but just slightly out of reach.
So onto the differences (compared to Diablo series). The first noticeable difference is the graphics, it is “full 3D” which means you can zoom in and out, and has a lot of pretty effects, such as water reflections etc. They are not amazing but good enough to set the scene, and acceptable in today’s standards.
The second major difference is the character development. You are basically given a blank slate, instead of a pre-defined class. This means that your character will develop to whatever you wish (choosing two masteries from eight) out of a possible of 28 classes. Other differences are less obvious. Here are two that I like very much.
1. In inventory when you move your cursor over an item it immediate displays the items attributes (e.g. damage, speed etc) as well as the attributes of the currently equipped equivalent so you can do a side by side comparison.
2. When you use the “ALT” to see the items littered around the landscape, you only see the unbroken items. There are two extra keys, one to show all items including broken and damaged items, and one just to show all the “interesting” items. This is a nice touch.
There are some small problems.
People reported a few bugs, which I have yet to encounter, which can spoil the fun of the game. IronLore has already released two patches and are actively working on the fixes.
Secondly I have a decent graphics card (7900GT) and default settings of the graphics is set to high. There have been a few cases of lag and low frame rates, which is annoying considering the graphics don’t look as complicated as say Oblivion. However, the lags are short and does not go bad enough to get you killed or spoil gameplay.
This is not a game for everyone, but a lot of people will like it, just because you can basically play it without any learning curve. No special skills, just click to kill. Do not expect a game where you talk about the amazing story, or fantastic adventure, but do expect to talk about how you killed 10 enemies in 15 secs with your super hunter with uber long bow.
It is a game where you can sit down and play for hours without noticing time going by, or just play for 30mins and know that after the 30mins you character will be better (more dangerous) than it was 30mins ago.
Good game, hope IronLore can fix the bugs and make it more stable. I rate it an 8.3.