This is the real fun of Champions, and it’s easy to lose hours upon hours to pushing just a little further to see if you finally find some better armor or stat-boosting items. A lot of what you choose will come down to aesthetics and personal preferences.Īs you progress through the game, you’ll get to customize your character in a million different ways. Still, it’s a pretty good spread, although there’s not a huge difference in the way that different melee or range-oriented classes will play. I found this slightly disappointing, as I’d love to see what the Frank Frazetta-ish approach to the female designs would result in with an Iksar lizard woman.
The two race-class combinations unique to Return to Arms, the Iksar Shaman and Van Shih Berserker, only come in male varieties. There are seven race-class combinations, five of which allow you to pick a male or female character model: the Human Barbarian, Wood Elf Ranger, High Elf Cleric, and Erudite Wizard.
Still, getting to choose whether or not you’re allied with good or evil adds some nice flavor and some replay value to Champions.Ĭharacter design in Return to Arms, if you don’t just import your old Champions of Norrath character, is very much in the traditional D&D vein. The basics will remain classic hack n’ slash either way: kill everything, get as much treasure as possible, cash in your plot tokens, and then move on. The differences in gameplay between the two paths aren’t very drastic, although there’ll be different maps and nominally mission goals. If you opt to be evil, then you’ll become Rallos Zek’s henchman and start assisting him in his rampage across the Planes if you pick the path of good, then you’ll be running around through the Planes to stop him from doing whatever villainous thing he’s up to at the time. The decision you make when you speak with Natasla will pretty much determine what you’ll be doing for the rest of the game.
You can choose to agree with her and be evil, or refuse and go about your heroics in peace. She makes fun of you for being Firiona’s champion and asks you to join the cause of evil. You agree and head out to the Plane of War to get started, and while you’re there, bump into an extremely evil (and therefore seven-eighths naked) priestess named Natasla. Rallos Zek, the Prince of Hate, is making trouble in the Planes, and Firiona wants you to go out and stop him while she stays behind and runs the horribly overpriced item shop. Once you’re through the character creation process, which also involves selecting how many players will be in your game and the difficulty level, you’ll be transported to the Plane of Tranquility and get a lecture about the backstory from Firiona Vie (y’know, the half-naked chick from the EverQuest boxes). Return to Arms doesn’t have a story so much as it has an excuse to go out and slaughter things. It can be played either on its own or as a sort of “expansion pack” to the previous Champions of Norrath game, letting you send your old characters on new quests for even more loot. The way Champions updates this old formula is entirely satisfactory, if not exactly a stunning exercise in originality, and the result is a very fun party game. It comes out of the same game design traditions as ASCII dungeon crawlers like Rogue and Nethack, but splashes in the multiplayer appeal of the arcade classic Gauntlet. Champions is a hack n’ slash-style RPG, light on story but long on action. Buy 'CHAMPIONS: Return to Arms': PlayStation 2Īfter reviewing so many Japanese action RPGs lately, Champions: Return to Arms is a nice change of pace.
0 kommentar(er)
