CONTROLS/UI

Adapting a mouse-based game to a controller is hard…but it’s been done well by the likes of Diablo III, Path of Exile, and Van Helsing, among others, in the past.

I feel like Black Forest learned almost nothing from those games. The basic movement feels fine, though at initial launch it had an awkward momentum to it and you had to stop moving in order to pick up items. Both of those things have been fixed.

Combat is where things start to get a little kludgy. The game relies heavily on an auto-targeting system, trying to intelligently select the nearest enemy you’re pointing at but frequently getting stuck on whoever it feels like. If you’re playing a melee character, you can basically just hold the attack button down and watch your guy run from opponent to opponent without doing anything else.

It’s not super engaging. And it all feels a bit like playing the game with your hands in a bowl of pudding.

Targeting ranged abilities is done either through the auto-targeting system, or through a vision cone you can bring up by holding a button down. You sweep the cone around and target who you’d like.

It’s slow and clumsy compared to other games in this genre…and so is the rest of the UI. Bringing up the inventory, the thing you’ll do the most often, doesn’t have its own hotkey. Instead you have to press Menu/Plus/The Touch Bar to bring up a radial menu, then use that menu with the analog stick to select the inventory, and then press X/A.

Other menus are accessed in a similar fashion. It all feels at least one step slower than it needed to be. I find myself desperately wishing for a tabbed menu a la the last two Assassin’s Creed games, rather than this multi stage selector.

Two smaller points about the menus. Firstly, when selling items to a merchant, you can’t also equip items. In the PC version, you totally can, saving you one extra step if you find you’d rather equip something than sell it, or if you decide you want to use the new sword you purchased right away.

Second thing: pressing Menu/Plus/Touch Bar a second time doesn’t close the radial menu. You have to press B/Circle, or make a selection.

That’s goofy.

If I instantly decide I don’t want the radial menu open, I have to move my thumb and press a different button instead of just rectifying my mistake with the same input. The same thing happens with the secondary menu that lets you save your game. Accidentally opened this or didn’t mean to yet? Too bad move your thumb!

This is the kind of stuff that testing/design experience usually weed out. At first I was inclined to think that maybe Black Forest just didn’t have the budget they needed to make this port the right way. But after seeing the numerous patches and improvements…well, I don’t know what to think.

BUGS/GLITCHES/CRASHES

Titan Quest on consoles has numerous new bugs that weren’t present in the PC original nor the Anniversary Edition…even after several big patches. Some of them are of the crash variety, though overall stability has improved.

The easiest bugs to spot revolve around asset streaming. On all three platforms you’ll see bits of the environment jittering and flickering around. Sometimes things won’t load at all, leaving either a gray or checkerboard mesh in their wake. Similarly, sometimes spell effects won’t load and you’ll hit your enemies with squares instead of fire.