As we sidle up to the next generation of hardware, it’s time to consider retiring a couple of video game genres. Let’s start with the dungeon crawler. Masking as an epic adventure, most crawlers are really just a series of hack-and-slash battles with a little item-collecting to break the monotony. But the meager excitement brought by breaking open a treasure chest in hopes of finding a sword is hardly worth $50.
At least, it is if you’re playing alone. The saving grace of “Champions: Brothers in Arms” is its multiplayer capabilities. Like a mildly advanced version of the arcade classic “Gauntlet” (the original dungeon crawler), you can at least chat with friends while plowing through swarms of monsters. And there’s always the fun that comes with arguing over who did the most damage to an area’s boss monster and thusly deserves the ultrarare, ultrapowerful sword it dropped in its death throes.
“Champions: Brothers in Arms” supports both online play and the PlayStation 2 Multitap, which allows you to plug four controllers into the system. (One of the PS2’s unforgivable oversights is the inadequate duo of controller ports. It’s hoped this will be rectified with PlayStation 3.) The online portal works well enough, but there’s something irreplaceable about having your comrades on the couch next to you, issuing orders to each other that always begin with the ubiquitous “dude,” as in, “Dude, totally cast a Wave of Flame when those bad guys get close.”
“Champions: Brothers in Arms,” developed by Snowblind Studios, is the sequel to last year’s dungeon crawler “Champions of Norrath.” At first glance, it’s nearly impossible to tell the two games apart, so little has changed. There are two additional character classes — a serpentine shaman and a jungle cat berserker — and they add considerable flavor to an otherwise vanilla lineup of humans and elves. But once you set foot in the Planes of Power, the stand-in fantasy realm, never has the second verse seemed as same as the first.
Caves, dungeons, grassy knolls all start blending together. They just serve as backdrops to a numbing number of battles, occasionally punctuated by dialogue scenes that inch the story forward. As you strike down monsters, which always inexplicably run straight at the player, you gain experience points that can be used to increase strengths and learn new skills, such as magic spells and attack techniques.
The vitality of the dungeon crawler may be questionable, but Snowblind’s talent for creating them is not. Bland backdrops aside, “Champions: Brothers in Arms” is an attractive game. The character models — especially the two new characters — are exquisitely detailed. The score is sweeping and something you wouldn’t mind putting on your iPod, but the voice work is merely par for video game banality.
But the dialogue is likely to be drowned out when “Champions: Brothers in Arms” is played the only way it is bearable: with other people. As long as developers promise to include plentiful multiplayer options in every crawler from “Champions” on and do something — anything — to dress up the scenery, then perhaps the genre deserves a stay of execution.
CHAMPIONS: RETURN TO ARMS
(star)(star)
Publisher: Sony
Platform: PS2
Genre: Adventure
Rated: TEEN
———-
KEY FOR GAMING PLATFORMS
PS2 — PlayStation 2
GC — GameCube
XB — XBox
GBA — Game Boy Advance
