The magnificent evolution of Diablo-esque games. A few unnecessary bugs are the only drawbacks.

User Rating: 8.7 | Champions of Norrath PS2
By Vorcoth | Review Date:
After finishing Champions of Norrath, I realized that I still owned Diablo and Diablo II. The first words out of my mouth were "What's the point?" Champions of Norrath has everything that Diablo fans salivated over - Great graphics, addictive hack 'n slash gameplay, a brilliant soundtrack, a great plot, and great voice talent. I nearly traded in Diablo and its sequel, but for sentimental reasons I just couldn't part with them. Gameplay positives: Like I said before, this game has everything Diablo fans would love. Hack 'n slash dungeon crawls where one character wades through hordes of monsters. As in most such action rpg's, you gain xp for kills, and go up in levels depending on how much xp you have. At every level you gain a few points to bump up your four basic statistics, thereby improving your hit points, your damage, your chance to hit, your carrying capacity, and/or your magic points. You gain equipment from the monsters you kill, or buy it from the various shops in the game, and each item has a unique look when equipped. The game combat isn't overly difficult, with the exception of a few challenging boss fights. The plot is great, as is the script and the voice talent. Gameplay Negatives: While very addictive, the game does have a tendency to get tediously repetitive. However, since it's pretty easy, the repetition won't really grate you down. A few noteworthy bugs made it past QA unfortunately, and usually occur when your job is to escort an npc companion to a certain point. For example, you resuce a gnome for a vampire's prison cells at one point. Often, the gnome will be invisible, or will get stuck on a wall or some other obstacle making it impossible for you to complete the mission and continue on in the game, forcing you to pray that you saved your game a relatively short time before the mission began. The game also makes use of teleporters quite frequently, and near the end of the game, you can only travel to the locales of the plot by way of teleportation devices. At one point, I activated the teleporter near the shop where it told me to "find another teleporter in order to travel back to this point". Finding the other teleporter activates the ability to travel between the two. However, if you get killed, the teleporters deactivate and will only give you the "find another...." message no matter what. Extremely frustrating. Graphics positives: Fantastic visuals and great cutscenes. The game designers have made the female characters sexy, and the male characters intriguing. The ability to customize your choice of character's appearance (hair colour, hair style, facial hair, etc.) is a fantastic addition. Oddly enough, the choices in this regard are even better here than in the "parent" Everquest MMORPG. It's also nice to see the option of three different levels of zoom during gameplay. i.e. You can play with full zoom, providing great details to appreciate but severely limiting the range of your line of sight, a mid-range zoom, and maximum distance zoom out. Graphics negatives: The sacrificing of sight range on the highest level of zoom in the game is too much to ignore. The mid-level of zoom is my favourite, though you lose quite a bit of the nice details you can seen on max zoom in. Sound positives: Awesome score. Awesome sound effects. Awesome voice talent. Sound negatives: None Value Positives: The replayability is enormous. After beating the game on the easiest difficulty level, you unlock the next level of difficulty, which provides access to more powerful and cooler-looking armour and weapons. Value Negatives: The bugs can be played around by saving often. Reviewer's Tilt: This game is a must have for PS2 owners. It's also a must have for fans of Diablo and/or Everquest. If you're a nut for RPG's, like me, get this game!!!!Go!! What the frig are you waiting for!!!?!?!

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