Way back in 2006 Iron Lore Entertainment and THQ released Titan Quest on the PC, a game that looked to offer a hack ‘n slash looting experience like Diablo but with an Ancient Greek motif rather than a Hellish one. And they totally succeeded at that goal, as Titan Quest was quite well-loved during its heyday on PC. Nearly a decade later, DotEmu announced at E3 2015 that they’d struck a deal with Nordic Games (now known as THQ Nordic) to port Titan Quest to mobile devices, and we even had a chance to go hands on with the mobile version during that E3 and came away very impressed. A little less than a year later Titan Quest arrived on mobile and although it suffered from some wonky technical issues it was far and away the most content-rich Diablo-like available on mobile and we enjoyed it a whole lot in our review.
Something we didn’t enjoy? The game’s publishing shenanigans. So the 2016 version was published by DotEmu, but in early 2018 the title was transferred directly to THQ Nordic’s label in the App Store, presumably because their publishing deal with DotEmu had run its course… or something. Whatever the case, those who owned the DotEmu-published version could still play it, but all new purchasers would need to buy the THQ Nordic version of Titan Quest to have the current “live" version which would be the one to receive any updates, should there even be any.
Well hey, these things happen, right? Publishing changes hands, the world of digital is a crazy one, and it’s not the end of the world. Except when it happens for a third time. Yes, later in 2018 THQ Nordic transferred their version of the game to their in-house developer HandyGames, who then had to republish it under their own label in the App Store and thus created a third distinct version of the game. The cruelest part about all this is that none of these versions of Titan Quest had ever received any updates beyond the few released for the original 2016 DotEmu version. Stupid people (me) kept re-buying these games in hopes of being able to receive updates that just never came.
Phew, sorry, I still get a little heated thinking about the whole thing. Anyway, the silver lining to that whole fiasco is that HandyGames are the current active developers of Titan Quest on mobile, and thankfully ever since they took over the reins in late 2018 they’ve released a number of extremely welcome updates for the game, most notably full screen iPhone X support in June of last year but also a TON of bug fixes. The game still has some occasional issues but nothing too major, and overall it’s still one of the best action RPGs you can get on mobile.
And really, as you probably already know from the headline, all this backstory is just to say that HEY! Titan Quest on iOS is currently on sale for just 99¢, its lowest price ever. If you somehow never picked this one up, or maybe you owned one of the older versions and never bothered re-buying, you really can’t argue with what’s on offer here for a dollar, so snatch it up quick before the price jumps up again or (God forbid) they decide to change publishers again.
