GB Feature: Titan Quest Review

Our own Steven Carter has written up a two-page review of Titan Quest, after spending close to 100 hours with Iron Lore's action RPG.
Each time you level up you receive points to put into the masteries. You can use the points to improve the skills in the masteries or to increase your rank in the masteries themselves (you might need to put points into the mastery to unlock skills in the mastery), and so you need to make a lot of decisions about how to spend your points. Do you put points into a lot of skills, or try to maximize only a couple? Do you spread your points between two masteries, or make one dominant? Do you put points into low level skills, or spend points on the masteries to unlock the high level ones?

What's nice about the system is that Titan Quest doesn't allow you to maximize everything, so you actually have to make choices. Better yet, even after playing for a long time, the points you spend still help your character (unlike, say, in Dungeon Siege II, where the diminishing returns mean that high level points barely do anything useful). I played a Warfare and Defense character, and I never even got a look at skills like Battle Standard and Colossus Form, and so that gives me an incentive to continue playing the character, to keep unlocking new skills. The different combinations of skill masteries also give players a reason to try out new characters, just to see what works and what doesn't.