Tactics and Abilities.

In this sequel to Champions of Norrath, the fate of Norrath is once again in your hands. Dark forces are trying to resurrect Innoruuk, the God of Hatred, and the choice is yours either to stop them or to turn to the dark side and aid in his resurrection. Once again, choose from either a wood elf ranger, a high elf cleric, a dark elf shadowknight, a barbarian warrior, or an erudite wizard, or from the new Vah Shir Berserker and Iksar Shaman classes. Create a new character or import your character from the first game, then begin a solo campaign or play with up to three friends. Quotes:Welcome to the Plane of War, champion of Firiona Vie. Tell me, what riches does the servant of Tunare offer for such blind allegiance? What power of your own may you reap?

You're nothing more than a pawn, a marionette on a string. Imagine fashion designer world tour. Perhaps there is a more. Kingdom island in ohio. Shall we say, profitable choice, Meed my words, brave warrior - renounce your vow to that pompous wench and join the forces of darkness! Together we shall resurrect the Prince of Hate and rule the world!

The forces of light grow weaker.».

But that's the real problem with Champions: Return to Arms: not much has changed at all. The visuals, while still solid, haven't been updated one bit; in fact, some of the creatures and environments are holdovers from the last game.

Likewise, the core gameplay is still intact, but this isn't a bad thing necessarily. Champions: Return to Arms, likebefore it, walks that fine line between monotonous and engaging: the relative ease of the game, challenge-wise and gameplay-wise, makes Return to Arms perfect for playing with only half your brain turned on.Champions: Return to Arms fixes up a lot of the issues with the online portion of the game. What was, for all intensive purposes, broken last year is now working just fine.

There are now lobbies, secured servers, server-side saves, player versus player modes, and it all works out pretty smoothly. New abilities have been added for each of the characters, but few of them feel like they're worth the pains of leveling for and some of them feel like they were added to help fix each classes' debilitating problems. The ranger, who relies primary on ranged attacks, receives abilities to summon arrows and have them weigh less as well as an ability that potentially bypasses shields.

They're all nice, yes, but there's nothing terribly exciting, nothing that really gives you incentive to push on and keep leveling.Of course, if the new abilities for your favored class don't tickle your fancy, you can start up one of the two new classes exclusive to Return to Arms: the lizard shaman or the feline berserker. The shaman plays like a hybrid between the wizard and cleric, with decent melee strengths and heavy spell-casting abilities, while the berserker plays like a ranger and warrior mix, with both strong ranged and melee attacks. Again, nothing terribly original for either class, but it's good to see the game expand a bit.