Titan: Olympus War Review

Already quite popular in its native South Korea, Titan: Olympus War has been chosen by KingkongGames as their first international market release. Combining city building elements with territory conquering, PVP/PVE combat, and wrapping the whole package up with anime-styled Greek gods on collectable cards, I thought I would be tripping over my words trying to figure out where to begin praising this game. If only...

To its credit, Titan seems to have a fairly robust set of mechanics in place, but where it totally fails is in its presentation to new players. I feel bad harping on this issue, but the in-game text translation is merely serviceable at the very best and headache-inducing at worst. My perspective may be skewed as somebody who does a lot of reading and a fair bit of writing, but it was truly difficult for me to get past this and actually enjoy the game.

But hold on! There’s a English language wiki, prominently promoted on a post-title screen pop-up! Well, that might help if 1) the wiki were not written with the same proficiency level as the game translation and 2) if it were anywhere approaching complete, which it’s not. Honestly, it speaks of a level of not caring much when a company feels the need to redirect their new player base to a third-party website rather than attempting a competent translation and more in-depth tutorial. Some of the home screen push notifications are still in Korean for crying out loud!

Beyond the language barrier, there are other times where Titan just flounders at communicating the most basic information. For instance, sending my Hero’s army off to conquer a nearby square of World Map territory seems simple enough, right? But after waiting a couple of real time minutes for them to march to their destination, they simply disappeared and the territory remained unclaimed. After a few retries met with similar results, I spent several minutes fumbling around until I finally stumbled onto my answer. The notification of my army’s apparent defeat was sent to the in-game mail system, which conveniently showed no indication that I had new mail waiting. There was no pop-up stating “You Lose” or even a belligerent “Hey, Check Your Mailbox, Idiot!” to inform me of what had happened.

And when I ventured to the one territory that I HAD conquered (with the aid of the tutorial) and attempted to build a new building there, I was greeted with the following: “To construct a building, You must have to choose the type of this city in the top of grid.” Grid? What grid? What city type? I have no idea what the game is even referring to. For that matter, I’m beginning to question if I’m even allowed to build on these new territories at all.

Buried under the strata of poorly implemented decisions seem to be the makings of an enjoyable game, but I doubt most players will make the Herculean effort to stick with Titan: Olympus War long enough to unearth it.