Champions of Norrath (PS2)

Champions of Norrath

Overview

Champions of Norrath is set in the Everquest Universe and is from the makers of Dark Alliance which some gamers might be familiar with. It is a fun and long lasting, fantasy hack and slash adventure. Perfect for multiplayer mode. People who like collecting various items, customising them and getting stats will love this game. The slightly high price is totally worth it.

Story

Your quest starts off with a speech from a Wood elf Lord who requires help to fight back against the orcs that have invaded his town and forest. This where you choose from five characters: (each with a male and female choice)
Barbarian warrior- strong in close combat, high stamina, can use bow
Wood elf ranger- strong with a bow and can have various archery abilities, lower stamina.
Erudite Wizard- strong magical attacks, low combat ability
High elf cleric- strong white magic, moderate stamina and combat
Dark elf shadow- knight- strong close combat and dark magic, good stamina
Each character's appearance can be customised, from skin colour to facial hair.

The first level is beyond doubt the most enjoyable and lengthy too. You fight your way through the beautiful woodland, killing every orc and goblin you see, leaving a trail of corpses in your wake. After freeing the forest of the enemy you pursue their leader down into the Underword. This is a darker place, where giant ants have invaded a village of gnomes. Naturally you kill them all and after a lot of missions that seem rather unrelated you find yourself in a vampire's castle, who's supplying undead forces to Pellis, the big orc enemy on behalf of Innuruk. Innuruk is the Lord of hate. He's an evil god that wants to take over the world, you find out he's holding a mysterious women prisoner who you set out to save.

So after the underworld level you sail to the pit of ill Omen, a sunny paradise land with broken portals that send you to many different strange levels. You're trying to find the legendary Horn of Ill omen before the orc does because he'll use it to shatter the planar barriers, releasing a deadly evil army into the world. After this level you go to a cool dark elf evil village, where you have to complete some missions in order to get to Innuruk. You then end up in a heavenly place, the plane of tranquillity. There you are told how to defeat Innuruk, and you are sent back into, essentially, Hell.

Game play

Despite the fact that your missions are very repetitive (kill hundreds of enemies to collect some sort of item) it rarely ever gets boring. Whether you're firing magic bolts at zombies, slashing the hell out of orcs or firing flaming arrows into ranks of goblins, killing things is very fun and rewarding. I'm not a violent guy either, I'm not one of these people who obsesses over GTA, anybody would find killing these orcs satisfying.

The whole story can feel a little, impersonal however. The reason being that your character never actually says a word to anybody; except in game play when a team-mate dies or you don't move for a long time etc. and they say some funny remark which does actually give a large insight into their personality. Also the missions can feel sometimes rather weird and pointless. A common occurrence is that in order to move on, you have to do a long string of missions related to each other. For example: For you to be able to go to the docks, you need to slaughter many hundreds of giant ants to get to the queen ant; then to get a guy to build you a ship, you need something worthwhile to pay him; a man has such a thing, but he's only going to give it you if you find his daughter; the daughter wont go back to her father if you don't help find five of her kittens (yeah I know, but you're still killing loads of skeletons on the way). And that's just one of the strings for that level. Sometimes you feel yourself thinking, 'ok, I set out to get rid of orcs from a forest, what the hell am I doing collecting kittens for a girl in the underworld?' But all of this can be forgiven by the fantastically fun killing and upgrading that is a constant throughout the game.

Levelling up

One of the game's main merits is the items and levelling up. Even right at the start of the game you have 20 points to spend on:
Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity or Stamina.
Each one is vital for every character. You get experience from killing things (you'd never have guessed) when you get a certain amount you get up a level. This means you can add three more points on to your stats, and improve one ability. Each character has around fifteen abilities that they can improve up to a maximum of 20 points worth. These abilities could be anything from more powerful sword attacks to ice arrows to raising the dead. With these abilities always available to upgrade, the game never gets boring. Though one annoying thing with the levelling up, is that it requires more experience to get each level (as you might expect) but it gets to the point where you can play for many hours without getting a level, they try to remedy this by giving you an increasing number of ability points each time. But I'd far prefer it if it were regular and small.

There are three difficulties of the game, and one of the reasons it's so long lasting is because you can play through it three times with your old character, still levelling up and acquiring abilities. Though you can not just start on these modes; they'll be impossible, you have to play on the first difficulty first otherwise your character wont be able to last two seconds in even moderate difficulty.

Items

Another fantastic aspect of the game, is the many items that can be equipped and carried. There are actually over 10,000 different items. Each item has a defence/attack value, a weight, and a selling price. These items can be pieces of armour, (which includes helmet, circlet, leggings, boots, shields, gloves, or chest plates), weapons (two handed, staffs, swords, hammers, bows) or special items which are used to upgrade existing armour or weapons. All the items come in varying quality and type hence the huge number of different items. The majority of these items will be picked up throughout your journey from the bodies of foes, but you can also buy them at the shop in each level. In the shop you can stock up on arrows, buy weapons or armour, buy the other items that also include healing and mana potions.
Each character has a certain amount of weight they can carry; this is determined by their strength and so can be increased. So you can pick up loads of items and then sell them at the shop, this is one of the main ways you'll get gold, and it's fun too.
As I said earlier, you can combine items with weapons and armour to make them even more powerful which makes the game even more interesting and free. There is a 'cheat' (though it's probably more of a loophole in the system) which allows you if you know how, to duplicate items. So if you want, you can have loads of these items and make your weapons really powerful, or make your armour really strong, or you could sell them and be rich!

Multiplayer

As fun as Champions of Norrath is single player, you really haven't got the most out of it until you've tried co-op. It's the characters, and not so much the place in the game that is saved. So brilliantly, you're free to import and export characters of any level into your game, so long as they're saved somewhere. You can import up to 4 players, which really is fun. With no split screen your team are free to wander fairly far and help each other slaughter your enemies. There are abilities like critical hit (characters within a certain radius of player have a chance of doing double damage) that really come into play with multiplayer. You can just have so much fun with other heroes by your side, whether they're stealing the kill of a boss you've been hacking at for ages or setting you on fire with a flaming arrow, it's just a great multiplayer game as well as single.

Simon Oates/ Ugluk1000