Champions was an ugly mess full of game crashing bugs.
Ok, I hated this game. I really really did. Not only did it feel like a poor expansion pack of Champions of Norrath, but it was full of game crashing bugs (re: graphics). I have never in my life been more bored playing an Action RPG in my life either. This is seriously one of the worst and I've sat through Bard's Tale, D&D Heroes, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and much other pieces of crap. I would recommend to never touch this. Everything about it is unpolished. The game is short, the combat is weak. There is nothing good about it. Stay away at your own risk.
----------Battle System----------
Champions of Norrath is an down-top-view dungeon crawling Action RPG. The point of the entire game is to crawl through a dungeon and make it to the exit, or find an item for a fetch mission, there's really no puzzles within the game or anything that require thought. You just run through it unmapping the unexplored randomly generated dungeon.
You gain experience for each monster killed, but none for completing a quest. After each level, your character will get ability points to distribute amoung the four ability sets, Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity and Stamina. After you sort out your points, you then get to add another point to your Skill set, which gives you Melee attacks or new spells.
There's only one person within the Hub that sells you weapons and armor, but what she sells is totally random. Monsters drop items at random at a REALLY high rate, and it seems ridiculous that a giant fly will drop an Shield after you kill it, but whatever. Your character will have a weight limit, so the more items he picks up the faster he'll reach his limit and can't pick up any more. What you have to do at this point is to warp back into town and sell all the worthless crap you picked up, and then warp back to your spot, you'll be doing this OVER and OVER again, it gets old.
You can transfer over your previous character from Champions of Norrath to this game. I started fresh though. You can still play four player co-op on or offline.
----------Characters / Story----------
Um.. a story.. hmm.. There isn't a story. You get to pick between various races and classes. There's two new classes you can choose from the last Champions, but I doubt anyone will go out of their way to play them. You can pick between being a male or female character and then tweak their looks.
Once you get a character ready, you meet up with some goddess who gives you quests. All quests revolve around fetching items or killing stuff. You might meet one or two NPC during a mission, but that's about it. There is barely dialog, and the dialog that does show up is worthless filler.
----------Graphics----------
Ok, compared to the previous Champions of Norrath, the character models look much better during dialog scenes. Even then they're still not "good". This is the last compliment I'll give the game because dungeons seem much poorly designed, cruder or basically just the same as before. There is no heart or soul put into any dungeon in this game. You retread through some of the same dungeons you did in the last game too! The boss battles aren't anything special either. There's nothing positive I can say about this game. The way the character models move during cutscenes look like the same crap you would see in an MIT commercial. I hate the transition between gameplay to a dialog scene. I hate all the edits during dialog scenes. Each edit or camera switch involves a full black screen that appears for nearly a half a second. This is so ugly and unpolished.
Besides the ugly graphics, the game is full of bugs. As mentioned in my header, I ran into a game crashing bug that stopped me from completing the game. I was in the last dungeon before the final boss then all of a sudden the floors disappeared on me. I could still run around the dungeon, but there was nothing I could do. If I died within this dungeon, the game would freeze on me. Even if I could reach the final exit, the game would still freeze on me. I could not progress. That's just one of many many bugs I found in this game.
Often times the screen would be all shaky during the inventory screen in the shop zone. Items would float, disappear or fall off of a ledge. Sometimes the framerate will drop, sometimes you can see the dungeon slowly loading in front of you. I hate the loading times, each time you open your inventory everything has to load separately.
While the game gives you a chance to change your characters looks with hair style and skin color it's almost pointless. You'll never get to see your character's face or hair once he puts on a helmet. The only time you'll even see your character is in an inventory screen.
----------Sound----------
Hmm.. there really isn't much for music. Champions mostly relies on ambient sounds, which is nice I guess. I mean, I can't imagine a game like this with blaring Techno or Metal, but it's also boring as hell with barely any sounds. Sometimes the little subtle music they do use cuts out to where the only thing you hear is grunts and boxes exploding.
The voice overs are typical emotionless voices you should be use to if you've played any of these games. The same bug from the previous game has returned, so the dialog box shows up long before actual voices kick in. This is stupid and should have been fixed.
----------World Map----------
Champions is a fairly mission to mission based game. There's one single hub in the game, which you constantly warp back to sell your junk, buy new items, save or to change missions. Once locked into a mission, you can backtrack to previous worlds, but your mission would end and you would have to restart it, which is dumb.
Once you beat a full mission, you will unlock a mini-game of sort. Each minigame is different pre-stage, but if you complete it 100% you get a Medallion (I have no idea what it does), bonus stats and new online maps. You also unlock a new dungeon, but they're never worth going through.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
??:??
Your time spent with the game is not recorded, which is always lame for an RPG. I did not get to complete the game, but I was in the last dungeon before the final boss, so I pretty much played through it. The game crippling bug is what stopped me from completing it.
