Champions: Return to Arms PlayStation 2

Champions: Return to Arms PlayStation 2

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Oct 26, 2006 | 1 out of 2 found this Champions: Return to Arms review helpful

Pros: Good coop play; side quests add variety; same visceral action.

Cons: Too familiar for its own good; visuals starting to show their age.

Return to Arms ostensibly picks up where Champions of Norrath left off, and the game even allows you to import your character from the first Champions. But the story is severely underplayed and essentially boils down to Firiona Vie, the hot elf-lady ...seen on the cover of EverQuest and its many expansion packs, asking you to save the world of Norrath--to be its champion, if you will. This is arguably where Return to Arms suffers the most. The original Champions was no Tolkien-esque epic, but it had more-memorable characters and a more compelling narrative to push you through hours and hours of dungeon-crawling. In Return to Arms, you largely get the feeling that the order in which the levels are presented could be completely shuffled with little or no consequence. And so begins your journey across Norrath, which isn't presented as a single cohesive globe, but rather, as a disjointed series of "planes," each with its own unique look and feel. Before you begin your trials, though, you'll have to choose your champion. In addition to the return of all the character classes found in the original Champions, Return to Arms introduces an iksar shaman and a vah shir berserker, known more colloquially as the lizard man and the cat man. It's somewhat disappointing that, unlike the character classes that return from the original Champions, there are no gender options for the iksar and vah shir characters. It's a missed opportunity to tap into the burgeoning furry market, but more importantly, it makes the two new character classes feel a little tacked-on. Of course, the different character classes aren't entirely about aesthetics, so each has abilities that cater to a different play style. There's something inherently more accessible, at first blush, about the more melee-intensive classes, such as the barbarian or the berserker, but a few hours of play reveals that the classes otherwise seem fairly well balanced. Read more Less