Product Description

Enter furious hack-and-slash combat set in the world of EverQuest! Choose from 5 different character races with hundreds of spells and abilities at your disposal and over 10,000 items to find. Random dungeon creation means you'll never play the same game twice. Take your adventure online and experience the thrill of multi-player adventure!

From the Manufacturer

Published by the creators of EverQuest and developed by the team behind Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath is an Action RPG like none other on the PlayStation 2. Create your own champion, each with unique powers, appearances and skills. Experience an epic adventure filled with powerful action and ominous intrigue. Battle vicious monsters where your mastery of weaponry and spells is the only thing between you and supreme evil.

Champions of Norrath allows gamers to create their own unique hero to journey from the city of Faydwer into the wilds of Norrath to save the land from a gathering army of evil orcs and goblins. Players can adventure alone or with a band of up to three other players either over the Internet or on a single PlayStation 2 with a Multitap. Import player characters into friends' games using a memory card and then take them home to play solo-the play options offer console gamers the freedom to play anytime and from any location. Champions of Norrath offers players more than 100 hours of gameplay per player character, unlimited battles, deadly missions and unmatched character customization in an enthralling fantasy world.

Review

Sony Online Entertainment's newest console addition to the EverQuest universe is impressive indeed. In fact, the amount of content Champions of Norrath offers is almost too much of a good thing (if that's even possible).

Developed by Snowblind Studios, the company behind the original Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath offers up the deepest dungeon crawling experience in the console universe to date.

Champions' list of features reads like a perfect recipe for success. There are five playable character classes each with a wide variety of customization, including the ability to name your own avatar. All the dungeons in the game, save the city hubs that connect the whole world together, are randomly generated so that each and every time you play the game the experience is different. There are more than 10,000 randomly generated items in the game, and players can even modify them to create their own unique items. The list, as they say, goes on and on.

But perhaps the biggest and best piece of the Champions puzzle is the fact that the game can be played online with friends. Using the Network Adapter, PlayStation 2 gamers can take Champions online to explore and level up their characters. In fact, the game has three different difficulty settings so that you can play it again with your leveled-up avatars.

This title can be played offline as well. In fact, you can insert or remove your character from an adventure any time you want. Play with three friends at Jimmy's house, and when his mom kicks you out for being a deviant, you can download your character to a memory card, and then continue playing with different players online.

All told, Champions of Norrath is a very compelling dungeon crawler. The ability to play online definitely makes it a standout in the sea of recent releases in the genre. However, the game isn't perfect. At times, it bogs down from the sheer amount of content it offers. Sometimes I felt like I almost had too many items to wade through or too many pointless dungeons to clear.

These simple complaints aside, if you love leveling up and searching for the latest and greatest weapon for your characters, you really can't go wrong with Champions of Norrath. It's a solid game that gets even better if you have the ability to go online and set out on adventures with other players from around the world.

Concept:
Use the EverQuest license to create an all-encompassing dungeon crawler

Graphics:
The graphics and effects are top-notch in the genre

Sound:
Obviously done by someone who has watched The Lord Of The Rings too many times (and that's a good thing)

Playability:
It's all about the hack n' slash, however the battles still manage to be fairly challenging

Entertainment:
If you love dungeons and finding items, you can't go wrong here

Replay:
High

Rated: 8.75 out of 10
Editor: Andy McNamara
Issue: February 2004

2nd Opinion:
With four-player online play, and the original Dark Alliance team fueling the development fires, you'd think that Champions of Norrath would be an easy pick over Dark Alliance II. As it turns out, both games excel in different ways and are equally rewarding. Norrath's greatest strength is its ability to make gamers come back for more. Both the online and single-player components have legs. With random dungeon generation, three difficulty settings (which require higher level characters), and over 10,000 items, there's more than enough content here. While both games play very similarly, Dark Alliance II edges out Norrath with little additions along the lines of dual-wielding and sprinting. Norrath is better suited for players who seek extensive multiplayer, whereas Dark Alliance II is the perfect fit for those who simply want a polished adventure to play through once.

Rated: 8.5 out of 10
Editor: Andrew Reiner

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