A Call To Champions

I invite the players of League of Legends to play a little drinking game for me. Take a shot every time Phreak says “tons of damage” in his spotlight….

What’s that? Drunk already after one spotlight? Well go and sober up and come back and I’ll tell you about a REAL MMO

Say hello to Champions Online, the most amazing super hero MMO ever made. Yes I have played and taken into account City of Heroes and that bastard child of a comic book and game known as DCU Online, and Champions Online is just all around better.

Mind you no game is without its flaws, CO may be free to play, but lots of good stuff you have to pay for, I had to take a week off of the game while I waited for the points to buy the class I wanted to play, but I can’t really blame the game for PayPal’s fault. None the less, having to pay for the good stuff is a No No for games no matter how good they are. On the upside, CO features an extremely lavish character customization builder. Even if you have to buy some of the REALLY good stuff, there are still enough options to build EVERY champion in League of Legends and still have enough left over to build half of Heroes of Newearth. The possibilities are endless and limited to only your imagination; needless to say with so many unoriginal people in the world you will see superman, batman, and everyone else from every super hero cartoon ever made.

Now then onto the plot; the tutorial sets you in a city under attack by evil alien invaders, this runs you through all the controls as well as the play styles before setting you into the games massive, unrestricted, invisible wall-less environment filled to the brim with your typical story quests which can unfortunately get kinda grindy… to party made instances and even (dare I say) “dynamic events” which put un partied teams of heroes together to tangle against rioters, jailbreaks, and everything else you can think of. They’re not as dynamic as what Guild Wars 2 has in mind, mainly because there’s no since of failure if you can’t complete an objective, partially due to the fact that most of them are UNFAILABLE. They could have done much more with that but I’m still not complaining because it was a lot of fun. I found myself playing each instance many times over and it never got boring.

If I had any advice it’s the obvious ones from a gamer point of view. Make at least every class available, cause paying for everything else is actually smart. Cosmetics is the quickest (and best) way to make money with a game, but limiting our creativity defeats the lavish customization options, and also give the dynamic events a sense of realism. If we fail to stop the jailbreaks make prisoners flood the streets and terrorize the city’s inhabitants. Give us a sense that what we’re doing matters for a reason other than we get extra loot and experience points.

I give Champions Online an 8 out of 10 I can’t wait to see new heroes in the lands of
Meleenium City.

Born of A Different Bloodline

It seems until Guild Wars 2 comes out I’m doomed to continue to play through the demos that at this point I’m sure big brand developers are releasing for the sole purpose of spitting on my attempts to review games. Luckily one development team has seen the light and it’s their game I am going to review!

This was originally suppose to be a review of Age of Conan online, but honestly if you want a review for that go watch Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation review cause my opinions on the game are no different. (I’ll even leave the link to the video for you at the bottom of this review to entice you to read it. [To those of you looking at your scroll down bar at this moment turn around because I’m right behind you and I’m holding a knife]) If you just fell for the above statement then put down Silent Hill 2 [that means you Yahtzee!] and check out this game: Bloodline Champions.

BLC is a MOBA MMO similar to the DoTAs like League of [blaaaaahhh]. Think DoTA without the Minions, because that’s exactly what it is. In this game instead of controlling a champion you pick a “bloodline” to represent your fighting style. Bloodlines can overlap in an arena unlike the Heroes and Champions of DoTAs and they all have similar play styles only tweaked a bit so that they vary from blood line to blood line. Each blood line has a “spam” skill, a “heavy hit” skill, a “chase/escape” skill, and a specific condition depending on the play style. The fire bloodlines do DoT Ignite damage while the warlock champs siphon health and cause fear.

Despite the massive array of bloodlines they are all flawlessly balanced a word that is apparently is on RIOT Game’s naughty list since a flawlessly balanced game is something they seem to be almost intentionally avoiding. You can buy champs with ingame cash, or with real life money (which defiantly takes a lot less time) and you can also play 5 bloodlines free each week. Like HoN and LoL BLC has costumes for sale for real money. However unlike HoN and LoL you can buy not only skins for your bloodline, but also skins for your weapon. You can ever buy a gender swap to play as male versions of female champs and vice versa.

As I constantly stress in my action MMO reviews this is something that is LONG OVERDUE. I honestly felt like I was playing myself in the game and that says A LOT for a MOBA whose set ups are typically 100% linear short of a few minor cosmetic upgrades.

Bloodline Champions is AMAZING, it bets LoL, HoN, RoT, I even dare to say it will be better than DoTA2, because quite frankly it is completely unique and endless hours of fun, which is more than I can say for its “Ancient” counterparts.

Bloodline Champions scores an 8 out of 10 if you’re into MOBAs then add this to your collection ASAP cause it’s nothing short of spectacular.

(also before I forget here’s Yahtzee’s Age of Conan Review: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/138-Age-of-Conan)