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Hit level one and you'll pick a "mastery," which amounts to a skill track. Lightning, fire, offensive or defensive melee paths, it’s your call, and all the basic permutations like weapons vs. spells, long vs. short-range, etc. are here. Each skill track comes loaded with passive or active powers, which you can level as you gain skill points by completing quests and offing creatures. Later, you get to pick a second mastery and either play to existing strengths or branch in some unrelated direction, which is another great example of how Titan Quest keeps you strategizing without really making you think.
The interface, cake as they come, looks not a little like Diablo and World of Warcraft fooled around. For instance, items are colored similar to WoW's: white for standard, purple for legendary, and comparable yellows, greens, and blues between. An experience bar slowly creeps rightward as you liquidate enemies. Several of the monsters share similar names, and the skill trees work suspiciously like WoW's talent system.
But who cares? Imitation in this case is the sincerest form of delivering the goods. In a few spots, it's even modestly enterprising, like the dual weapon-sets which let you quick swap a sword and shield for bow and arrow without popping into inventory and draggingthings around. On the other hand, you have amateur mistakes like a map you can't click on to send yourself hiking over long stretches if you need to backtrack for a side quest or want to clear an area you bypassed. Or how about spell effect icons that give no sense of duration? Inefficiently auto-organizing inventory slots? No way to pan the camera around transparency-befuddled cave walls or cliff ledges?
