There's a solid axim in the gaming industry that says that if you're on to a good thing, keep on releasing it as long as people will buy it. Well, something''s got to explain why the consistent top sellers are either yearly updates of sports games, or sequels to existing titles. Champions Of Norrath sits in an interesting spot as regards sequels -- it's an Everquest game, although you needn't panic about subscription fees -- and it's based on Snowblind's engine used in the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games. If you've played either console title, you'll find Champions Of Norrath entirely familiar. It's not really a case of great or inspiring innovation, but it is a solid use of the Snowblind engine into an engaging title.
As with the Baldur's Gate games -- and Atari's 4-player Dungeons & Dragons title -- the plot is really rather secondary to wandering from dungeon to dungeon, slaughtering every wee (and not so wee) beastie that you happen to come across.Suffice it to say that you (and up to three of your chums if you're either multi-tap or online enabled) are the only people who can hold back the forces of darkness, rend the opposing evil armies into their constituent bloody chunks,and somehow support a fantasy economy primarily through pillaging the bodies of the dead for random bits of armour and weaponry. We're still not sure why toothy beasts who lurk in the forest would choose to carry around pairs of slightly soiled pantaloons that just happen to fit you, but then again, we never stopped from killing them for long enough to really find out why.
While it lacks the D&D licence that powers the Baldur's Gate games -- and, oddly enough, Knights Of The Old Republic (we could never quite figure that one out), the basic fantasy precepts that Champions Of Norrath uses makes it pretty easy to pick up, and this is helped by the descriptive text that details the strengths and weaknesses of each character class as you initially choose them. On the minus side for giving out information, however, are the visual representations of each weapon, armour and spell that you acquire in the game. While the visuals for this are decent, it won't take you very long at all to work out that it's a massively inefficient system for actual weapon selection, as every time you pick up an object -- and Champions Of Norrath has thousands of them -- you'll have to move the onscreen cursor over each and every one of them to work out what it does.
Character progression in Champions Of Norrath follows a familiar path. Each of the game's characters -- five classes in all, with minor choices such as gender, hair colour and even skin tone being purely superficial, but nice to have nonetheless -- has a skill tree and statistics, and here the game does very well at explaining itself; you're highly unlikely to pick the wrong skill or upgrade your attributes incorrectly. In a nice stab at maintaining longevity, Champions Of Norrath's harder game modes only unlock when you've completed the main game on normal difficulty -- meaning you can take your higher level characters on to some really challenging fights, even once the game is "finished".
Champions Of Norrath's presentation veers rather wildly between being very impressive (for a PS2 title) to being substantially sub-par. When the magic's flying, and the hordes start falling at your feet, you'll bear witness to some intense visual effects, solid modelling options and well-laid out level choices. However, when (and it happened all too often for our liking) Champions Of Norrath chooses to glitch, it tends to glitch very badly indeed. Problems range from slow screen redraw to juddering onscreen menus, with little rhyme or reason to dictate why one situation should be glitchy and another not. Thankfully, we never hit any game-stopping bugs -- just a lot of minor graphical glitches which detract from an otherwise solid game. For what it's worth, the voice acting that accompanies the game's text is reasonably good, although as with pretty much every game in this particular genre, we reckon there's not too many gamers that will listen to every moment of it.
Champions Of Norrath also features an online mode, which in theory sounds great. Who wouldn't want to drop into a multiplayer fantasy universe and go forth, slaying all that you find? Well, the theory is great, and even the implementation (for an online PS2 title) is fair, but in our experience, you'll have a hard time finding players who you'll actually want to play against. It's a reasonable option if you're playing against established friends, but we'd suggest it's even more fun if you can bring everyone together with a multitap. After all, there's no shared pool of gold, and it's much easier to punch someone in the head if they're actually sitting next to you.
(note: CNET.com.au does not condone player-on-player violence. Except, of course, when somebody steals the last healing potion. Then it's chainsaw time.)
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