Electronic Gaming Monthly: Champions: Return to Arms

Good: Neat “good versus evil” branching story lines

Bad: Bang-your-head-against-a-wall boss battles

And Did They Really: Have to throw in that stealth mission?

JENNIFER: Return to Arms does a ton of stuff right—beautiful graphics, interesting environments, and satisfying, no-frills, action-RPG hacking and slashing, plus an online mode to keep you happy once you’ve beaten the offline game. I played for dozens of hours without tiring of the endless maps and mazes. It induces a sort of Zen-like state, that nice and easy middle ground somewhere between mind-blowing and mind-numbing.

Last year’s game got repetitive at times, and that’s fixed here with better pacing—some shorter maps, more diverse enemies, and just enough variety in the layout and puzzles. The role-playing aspects allow for specialization without being overly complicated, and I liked the branching story lines. Unlike, say, Knights of the Old Republic, here you actually visit different levels and fight on opposite sides depending on whether you choose good or evil.

The game’s downfall is its boss battles, though. Uneven difficulty makes them annoying—I hate killing one boss without a scratch, then dying repeatedly as the next one kills me in a single hit. It’ll sure break you out of your Zen-like state, but not really in a good way.

SHOE: It’s so 1990s to be playing the good guy, so for Return, I chose the path of evil to see different worlds from the do-gooders. I got a variety of objectives and several bonus stages (one in which I spent way too much time gambling my gold away), so I started enjoying this more than most other hack-n-slash-n-level-up adventures. This enthusiasm was short-lived, though. As I paraded through the areas killing similar tiny enemies over and over (even the “big” monsters don’t intimidate), it took forever to find any exciting, rare items to wield. Without those incentives, things got monotonous.

JON D: I’ve spent limited time with preludes like Baldur’s Gate and the first Champions, so I don’t have much of a buffer to muddy the gameplay similarities between Return and the 8-years-old, nearly identical Diablo (PC, PS1). Despite its shameless lack of evolution, the formula is still marginally fun. Scouring dungeons for magic-imbued leggings and a slightly faster longbow actually took me away from Halo 2 for a short while. I can’t say I enjoyed the ambiance—plot lines are forgettable and the characters painfully generic—but I think this one’s worth a mindless-weekend rental. P

THE VERDICTS (OUT OF 10)

Blue mist or no, we recognize that EverQuest elf chick a mile away.

JENNIFER 7.5

SHOE 7.0

JON D. 6.0