By Daniel Florido

An Action RPG worth playing, the realm of Norrath is both expansive and detailed

I've never played games such as Diablo or Dark Alliance before. It's true. And so when I was saw a copy of Champions of Norrath (CoN) in the office, I was like "Hell yeah home-boy!"

I love games like this where you have lots of control over your character and his evolution in the gameworld, and bring on that medieval shit!

But his holiness the "Editor" didn't want to give it to me straight up - something about too many exclamation marks and dollar signs in my writing, so I lied my a$$ off to get my dishonest little hands on it, because life is about personal gain.

That's right! Nothing more, nothing less. And guess what, this game kicks a$$ too!!

And you know why it kicks a$$? 'Cause it's an instantly addictive slice-n-dice, collect-a-thon. Yup, you basically run around large scale medieval playgrounds (45 levels worth), killing monsters and looting their cadavers for better weapons, amour, gold, and spells.

There are over 10,000 randomly generated lootable items which play a major role in your melee success rate. The strong get stronger and the weak die via a well made, reinforced morning star blow, worth about 2000 pieces of gold. Personal gain my friends. Such is life! Such is capitalism!

The story works like this: Norrath has become a war-zone and the King of Norrath - your stereotypical wimpy old man - is seeking tough guys (like yourself) to go have a smash with all the bloody goblins, orcs, large wombats, vampires and the occasional flying ant that are causing a ruckus around ye olde neighbourhood from wence thou cometh

The King's a bit of a knob actually. When you meet him he's really friendly and glad that you're gonna help out with his little "My cities Under attack!" problem, but when it comes to a little financing for the job at hand he's not placing any bets.

He simply sends you on your way, empty handed. Considering that you start the game looking like a hobo with a few pieces of gold and "hand-me-down" armour and weapons, he's a bigger cheapskate than Will Barker at a charity drive for the impoverished.

Statistics - the core of all good role-playing games

Anyway, the missions are basic, easy to follow and fairly enticing, but really the action for me lies in the looting element and the ever longing search for more interesting weapons, stronger armour (hopefully in red - it goes faster) and more spells.

Most levels finish up with the slaying of a boss of some sort who is usually twice the size of you and much better equipped.

Weapons, armour and spells can also be purchased and sold at the local Norrath "Guns and Ammo" store, which stocks more items as the game progresses.

The store and other locations throughout the game can be accessed quickly via the use of portals which are located strategically throughout every level, which can be seen as a kind nod to the classics of the action-RPG genre - like Diablo - or a complete rip-off, depending on whether you have a mean-spirited or kindly personality.

The portals (which look like telephone poles) come in handy when you have looted way too much equipment and cannot carry anymore and need to unload some of the goods at a heavily discounted rate to the store keeper. The greedy bugger then has the gall to sell them back to consumers at a massive profit. Just like Cash Converters...

Champions of Norrath has been crafted with an extensive sense of detail to many aspects of the game - to start with you can choose one of ten characters to be your vehicle of medieval capitalism: Barbarian Warriors, Elf knights, Erudite Wizards, Wood Elf Rangers and so on.

All varieties of hero have a male and female version with highly customisable visual features such as hair, skin, tattoos and facial hair. Your choice of character or will also dictate the types of styles of weapons and armour that you can use, adding somewhat to the replayability factor - as in, if you wanna use all the weapons in the game, you've got to play through with different characters.

An excellent menu system has been created in order to display all the items that you possess. Simply put, it's a large- scale 360° rotary model of yourself displayed so as to visually equip and dress your character with selected armour and weaponry. Very striking get-ups can be achieved as you mix-and-match you barbie-doll warrior with complimentary colours and styles.

"Ice to meet you..."

It's always happy-time at my apartment when a character levels up on CoN, as like all good RPGs this is where you will shape your character's ulitmate destiny.

You earn experience points by killing and stabbing, and upon passing levels you can upgrade four specific attributes: strength, dexterity, intelligence and stamina.

Weaponry and armour has been dealt with in an ultra-detailed way, which I think is very cool.

Throughout your journey you will come across a variety of weapons and armour in various forms, including rods, morning stars, helmets, boots, gloves, halberds, axes, cleavers, hammers, knives, sticks, staffs and swords - and rarely will you come across equipment that isn't cracked or battleworn or damaged in some way.

Eventually you build yourself up to the point where you are a full blown knight or knightess in shining, decorative battle armour with premium quality hammers and morning stars. Booyah!! Now you're ready to take on the biggest, baddest vampires and goblins the hard a$$ed city of Los Angeles has everrrrr....er... jungle pathways of Norrath can produce.

Snowblind has catapulted a nice little graphical bomb on the Con level design as well, with lovingly crafted caves, forests and castles making for nice eye-candy. The environments are packed to the gills with decoratively placed rocks, lakes and other marsupials, which are a real pleasure to walk through due to the superior fluid dynamics and other such features.

My only beef is due to the "Gauntlet" style isometric camera work, which restricts any real close-up action, it results in the characters looking too small and "cutesy" rather than intimidating and blood-soaked. However the isometric camera angle works nicely when it's time for some multiplayer action, as everyone shares the one large screen - forget having four puny little boxes.

Online Play is where this game takes you to the next level, and teaming up and battling it out with four of your friends for a night of medieval rampaging is a captivating experience indeed. Team play elements such as the sharing of weapons and group spells add to the usual online enjoyments, and look out for the expansion pack too, Champions: Return to Arms.

If you're a capitalist pig-dog who enjoys plundering and pillaging at the expense of poor goblins and mutated giants, Champions of Norrath will impress. Moreover, if you've ever played Diablo or Gauntlet, CoN will also delight, offering a raft of randomly generated weapons, items and armour, and plenty of baddies to cut, bludgeon and generally smash into bloodied chunks of festering putridity. Champions of Norrath is a traditional action-based RPG that works well is rarely gets boring. Top stuff!

Game: Champions of Norrath
System: PS2
Players: 1-4
Online: Yes
Developer: Snowblind Studios
Distributor: Ubisoft

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Champions of Norrath is on the shelves now.