Champions: Return to Arms

The second game in the Champions series, Return to Arms scratches a very unique itch for people who like gaming with others, as did its predecessor. While the single player game is a fairly generic dungeon crawl, with a story that can be easily ignored, kicking it into multi-player mode and tearing through Norrath with a friend makes it all worthwhile.

The game itself plays like a straightforward dungeon crawl, with the storyline propelling you through a series of themed dungeons in different planes (fire/water/time/etc) that are loosely recognizable from the MMORPG Everquest (EQ). It gives you a choice of basic classes from EQ, including a Shadownight and Beastlord, then lets you play with attribute points for the basic stats that effect your health, damage, and magic power, as well as skill points for each classes' branching skill tree. The skill tree allows for quite a bit of customization, like if you want to do more damage with swords or axes, and also opens up access to various spells/abilities.

Having all this customization available is great for replay value, especially as the game encourages leveling your character up with harder difficulty levels scaled to higher character levels. With newer, more interesting, equipment as you play through to higher ranks. There is also a second path through the game available to you that changes the way a good portion of the game is approached, by choosing to take an "Evil" route through the game shortly from where you begin.

Unfortunately, while there is a lot of variety with how you approach the gameplay itself, it can get tedious if you want to play solo. A lot of the creatures in the game have a tendency to rush you from all sides, and bosses especially hit *extremely* hard. Having a friend to blam... err... plan tactics with takes everything to a new level. Not only by playing in the same room, but this is also one of the few PS2 games that actually takes advantage of the network adapter if you should happen to have one.

With a network adaptor and headset, you can connect to Sony's free servers, where you can play games against people anywhere with voice chat, and the ability to store your character information on their servers. This is a similar model to Blizzard's Battle.net Realm servers for Diablo 2 in that it discourages cheating by not giving you local access to the character save files for potential abuse/cheating. Not only can you play through the normal game online, you can also participate in arena-style PvP duels to test out your skills and character against others online. While a short diversion, it is nice to see just how well your gear and skills stack up.

Overall the game is a fairly generic dungeon crawl in single player, but if you are interested in multi-player cooperative play at home or online, this is one of the better offerings for the PS2. Also, as a final note, if you should happen to have a save game from the first Champions game, you can import your character into this one to immediately start playing at a higher difficulty level in the new game.