Phineas's Review of

Champions: Return to Arms (PS2) (SOE / SnowBlind)

What’s the easiest way to make a sequel to a fairly popular game, simply cut and paste 90% of the original into the sequel! Yeah! Wait a minute…

Champions: Return to Arms is the sequel to 2004’s experiment in adventuring in the world of EverQuest off-line. The first game was a very enjoyable dungeon crawling, item hunting, orc killing game reminiscent of games such as Diablo II. It was fairly well received and was a nice change of pace from its online bigger brother.

One good thing deserves another right? Well…generally yes. If the goal is to take an existing medium and make changes for the sake of improvement and for the correction of original flaws, you’re on the right track. However, when you replant a flower in a new pot, all you have is the original flower in a new pot. Such is the case with SnowBlind’s Champions: RTA.

Champions: RTA plops the character (for all intents and purposes) right back where he started again in the original game. In fact the game’s starting location is the original game’s ending location. This is isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I’m just simply stating the scene. Firionna Vie charges you with saving the different planes of the EverQuest world from those bent on resurrecting Innoruuk (whom you just killed). One nice change about Return to Arms is that of choosing your side. Side with Firionna and fight for good, or you can side with evil and take orders from an even top heavier woman with less clothes on then any woman you’ll find in any Christina Aguilera video you can hope to find.

Another change in this installment is the addition of two new character classes. You can now play, in addition to all the previous classes, as either the Vah Shir Berserker (an anthropomorphic class of Tiger-men) or as the Iksar Shaman (a jack-of-all trades class of Lizard-men). The addition of two new classes is nice, and I personally enjoyed playing as the Vah Shir Berserker, but it hides a bigger problem. Any major noticeable changes to the existing classes are really hard to find. A few new skills have been added to the existing classes, but nothing noteworthy or that which would cause you to disregard the skills you used in the first one. In fact, the two new classes are more of botched clones of some of the original classes, than completely original. The Vah Shir Berserker for all intents and purposes is the Barbarian class with an emphasis in axe-throwing.

Location is another issue in this game, or rather, the lack of new locations found within. You will simply revisit locations that are eerily reminiscent or exactly identical to locations found in the first game. In fact, there are more repeat areas than new ones. Now, I never really played much of EverQuest Online, but I do know that the EverQuest world is rather expansive. So why then did SnowBlind simply choose to regurgitate the locations of the first game into the second? Then if you consider that the new locations in the game are nothing to be moved by, you are essentially replaying the first game.

All in all, it hurts me to say all this, because I was a big fan of the first title. I probably played through the original Champions at least 5-6 times, not including multiplayer romps. I was really looking forward to the next installment. The game plays just as well as the first one did in all respects. You fight, you level up, you kill bosses, etc. etc. In a game as simple as this premise is, to make a worthwhile sequel, you really have to give the player something new. The graphics are great, the lighting and sound and particle effects are just as nice as the first installment, but I simply can’t escape the nagging feeling that I’ve played this game before. Oh…that’s right, I have.

I give Champions: Return to Arms for the PS2 a C+.