Welcome to our CHEATfactor Game Review of Titan Souls. We review the game and then factor in how the available cheats affect the overall game experience. For better or worse, our reviews will help you decide whether or not to use cheats when playing the game.

The first time I beat a boss on Titan Souls I thrust my fist in the air in celebration. It was a move that I found myself repeating each and every time. The game's unique combination of elements from different genres and time periods is a strange concoction indeed, but it's also one that works. Titan Souls is not just an extremely fun and rewarding game, it's the type that sticks with you and you think about strategies even when you're not playing the game. It's the type of game that you break out the notebook and pen for, a pretty amazing feat when you take into account just how simple the game's base idea is. Awkward level design and lack of exposition be damned, I loved Titan Souls.

So just what it Titan Souls? It's perhaps most easily explained by taking Dark Souls, 16-bit Zelda games, Mega Man and Shadow of the Colossus and rolling them all into one big ball. I know that may seem like a strange mix but it works...somehow. You roam around a mysterious land, searching out bosses and trying to defeat them. It's that simple, sort of. There are no enemies besides the bosses and no stages to clear to get to them; you just fight them but half the fun is finding them. At the beginning of the game you're dropped in the middle of this world and just left to explore. You'll walk through caves and climb walls all to find these bosses, which you can take on in any order (thanks Capcom). The first area is pretty easy to get through since it's all laid out for you but I've got a notepad full of sketches and notes about where to find certain bosses and their weaknesses.

That was part of what made me really fall in love with Titan Souls in the first place, the sense of exploration. I wasn't a robot seeking out my creator or trying to save a princess - I was just a kid exploring and doing what I needed to survive, making each discovery both an achievement and a bit of a frantic occurrence. I would have loved a bit more exposition to the world in which Titan Souls takes place in since there's none to be found, but there's a certain charm to leaving things as vague as the developers did. Each time I found a new area, it was a remarkably rewarding feeling, even though I knew I was leaving some secrets behind in the last area. I'm pretty sure even though I've poured a ton of time into the game, I still haven't found everything in the game, which keeps me coming back again and again.

The boss battles themselves are at the heart of Titan Souls and where the Dark Souls comparisons mostly come from. Yes, you're going to die, a lot, and the game makes sure that you know that - telling you just how many times you've died versus how many bosses you've killed each time you visit the game's main menu. The key here is that each boss only takes one hit to kill, and so do you, so each encounter is a tense session where you're trying to figure out just what you have to do to take them out. Some of these bosses are typical follow their pattern type affairs while others are more like puzzles. Take one boss early on in the snow level for example, you have to get it's own lazer to hit at one of it's shields and then attack the weak spot. It took me more times than I'd like to admit to figure this out, but man was it rewarding when I did.

There are no upgrades or power-ups in Titan Souls. It's just you, your arrow and the bosses. It's a bit of an admittedly thin package in that regard but there's also something so admirable about just how simple it keeps things. You'll obviously become very familiar with what you can do pretty early on in Titan Souls, but the game continuously finds new ways for you to use them at almost every turn. You can change how hard your shoot your arrow by holding down the button and you can also summon it back to you through the air. I found a lot of bosses became easier if I was able to shoot the arrow behind them and then take them out with my retrial attempt, but it hardly ever went as easy as it sounds.

Titan Souls is not for everyone but I simply can't recommend it enough. It's fun, rewarding and seems to get bigger each time you play it. I've poured hours and hours into the game, drawn maps and written notes into my notebook and I still don't feel like I've seen nearly everything the game has to offer. It brings me back to a time period where not everything was online (though it is) and I had to figure things out on my own. Now get off my lawn.