Currently scheduled for release early next month, Champions: Return to Arms is an action role-playing game from Snowblind Studios, the developer responsible for both Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and last year's great Champions of Norrath. One of Return to Arms' most exciting features is sure to be its support for up to four players either on a single screen or online. For this preview, however, we've actually been playing the game solo, and we've found the experience to be very enjoyable we might add.

The character-customization screen will help to ensure that you never run into your doppelganger online.

Fans of Champions of Norrath will find much that's familiar in Return to Arms, including all but two of the character classes that you can choose from at the start of the game. The existing roster of human and elf warriors, rangers, clerics, wizards, and shadow knights (now with new spells and abilities all around) has been bolstered with two additional characters: the iksar shaman and the vah shir berserker. The iksar shaman is a well-rounded lizard character with decent melee and magical abilities. The vah shir berserker looks like a bipedal tiger (or a leopard, panther, or lion, depending on your skin choice) and will be the most powerful melee character in the game. Once you've settled on a race-class combination that's to your liking, you'll be able to customize your character's appearance using options that vary according to your character's race. The aforementioned vah shir berserker, for example, simply has five different skins to choose from, while the human and elf classes boast a number of different skin tones, hair styles, hair colors, and facial hair options. The lizardlike iksar race can be customized in much the same way as the humans and elves, except that the word "hair" is replaced with "horn."

If you played Champions of Norrath previously and still have your character on your memory card, you'll be pleased to hear that you'll be able to import him or her into Champions: Return to Arms. This will not only allow you to skip the new game's easier difficulty levels (there are four in total: adventurous, courageous, champion, and legendary) and jump straight into a game that's suitably challenging for your returning hero, but also you'll have the opportunity to take your character's progression up to a whopping level 80. The level cap in Champions of Norrath, you may remember, was 50. Each of the difficulty levels in Return to Arms is designed to cater to a particular character level rather than to players of varying ability. The legendary setting is considered suitable only for characters rated at 65-plus, so even those of you importing high-level characters can expect to play through the new adventure at least twice. For the record, Sony Online Entertainment claims that Return to Arms has been designed to offer over 100 hours of gameplay per character--and that's without factoring in the game's all-new online head-to-head mode in which you'll be able to fight against other players for bragging rights.

The up-close camera angle isn't terribly useful, but it looks great all the same.

If you've played either Champions of Norrath or Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance before, you'll have a pretty good idea of what you can expect from Return to Arms in terms of gameplay. The action is viewed primarily from a camera that is positioned behind and quite high above your character, and you can rotate the camera at any time using the right analog stick. Pushing the right stick up and down will allow you to switch between the default view and the view positioned much closer to your character, and clicking the R3 button brings up a minimap that makes negotiating the often repetitive-looking levels much easier. Even the default camera occasionally feels like it's a little too close to show you as much of the surrounding area as you'd like. However, moving the camera any farther away would most likely make it too easy for you to spot enemies before they're alerted to your presence and come after you.