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Clan of Champions is the latest title from publisher NISA and developer Aquire. A little more serious then most of the titles NISA publishes, Clan of Champions mixes Gladiator Combat with Action RPG mechanics in hopes of making a fun, but deep brawler on the Playstation Network. Does it succeed in entertaining us, or does Clan of Champions deserve the big Thumbs Down? Neither, really.

The game starts you off by creating your warrior of choice. Humans, elves, and ogres all exist in this fantasy land of battle, and you can choose to be any one of the three. Once you figure out how your genitalia will look (that is the difference between the three classes, right?), you can choose a fighting style. Sword and Shield is a viable combo, as well as dual wielding weapons, or just using your fists to beat the ever living hell out of everything in sight (my style of choice.) The customization options in terms of looks are few, but they do the job well enough. Once you?re done christening your warrior with an intimidating name that will instill fear in the hearts of all foes (I named my ogre ?Steve?), Clan of Champions sends you out on your first mission. And your last mission. No, the game isn?t incredibly short. I?ll explain what I mean shortly. But first, let?s talk combat.

Any game that considers itself an ?Action RPG? of sorts better be good in the ?Action? department at the very least, and Clan of Champions is more than serviceable. Clan of Champions isn?t akin the Action RPGs that immediately come to mind like Torchlight or Diablo III. There?s no dungeon crawling or boss raiding in this land. Instead, the combat is strictly 3 warriors versus 3 warriors, going toe to toe for all of the glory. To defeat your armored foes, you have a few combat options. There are high, medium, and low attacks that can be used in combination with each other, as well as 4 skills, which can be anything from a powerful strike, to some nice fireball flinging magic. For the most part, you?re just going to be flailing away until the person standing opposite of you stops breathing, much like in Dynasty Warriors. Some strategy does appear in the way skills and armor works in the game though.

Many of you will like to hear that you can, quite literally, beat the pants off of someone in this game. Remember those high, medium, and low attacks? They can be used repeatedly to inflict massive disrobing damage. Punch someone in the gut enough and their chest plate armor will give up from the beating and fall right to the floor, exposing all of those wonderfully soft and gushy organs for a pounding. And the more you use a certain skill or technique, the better you become at it. Steve pounds someone in the head enough to get better at said pounding, and being better at said pounding allows better and more damaging pounding by Steve to be done. It?s a terrifically brutal cycle of punishment.

Punching someone in the face enough to break their helmet, and eventually their skull, feels way too good in this game. It does get button-mashy at times because often, beating your opponent to the punch seemed to be the best tactic. This makes the combat a little shallower than I think the developers wanted it to be. But it still remains fun and by far the game?s shining spot. All that armor breaking serves a purpose, too. The ?RPG? side of Clan of Champions comes in the fact that everything you beat off of your opponent can be bought and worn after the battle. This includes weapons, helmets, chest plates, gauntlets, and everything else your medieval-fantasy loving mind can think of. I did enjoy mixing and matching the best armor, and pairing those pieces up with upgraded and new skills to turn Steve into a death machine. And you will need to outfit and upgrade your character wisely if you want to fair well in the later difficulties and in online play for a long time. Now, whether you want to play this game for a long time isanother story. Remember when I said that if you played the first mission, you played the last? I think it?s time we addressed that.

I think the biggest blow that Clan of Champions hits itself with is the lack of variety in the stages you visit and the missions you go on. When reading the mission descriptions, my mind couldn?t help but think that we would be fighting in Town Squares full of fanfare and busts of the ruling king, or rolling hills covered in tall grass out in the countryside of a majestic land. You know, the usual fantasy stuff. But what you get instead are a series of gray chambers with the occasional patch of foliage and more pillars than an ancient Greek architect could ever dream of. And each ?mission? you embark on is the same. You show up, beat down a group of 3 humans, or armored skeletons, or a mix of elves and orcs, or? it doesn?t matter really. Because once those human-like avatars are dead, you might fight a group of 3 more. If you?re lucky, the mission will be ?completed? right then and there, or you may have to face a third group of enemies, and then the mission ends. You go back to the somewhat clunky menu screen, read another description of this awesome sounding encounter and at this majestic fantasy land, then the mission loads and you realize its the same place you fought at before, and the same three enemies are coming at you. Great.

And this is true in every mode, online or off, and every difficulty in the game. In fact, the harder difficulties are you just replaying the same set of missions against harder opponents. So essentially, you are playing the same set of missions in the same order as before when the missions weren?t even different to begin with. If Steve is such a great warrior, than why does the opposition keep sending the same number of enemies at him and his crew in the same environments at the same time of day every day? A variety of missions would do this game wonders. Hell, just even changing up the scenery and throwing some different enemies at us every once in a while could work to make the game that much more enjoyable. The mechanics of this game?s combat are good, but doing the same thing over and over and over again, in the same arena, against the same enemies, makes the game lose whatever luster it had pretty quickly.

Clan of Champions is a game that is a victim of everything but its gameplay. The combat is well crafted and fun for what it is, and the armor and skill matching is does an admirable job of bringing the RPG elements into the the game. But the complete lack of scenery and variety in missions help define the word monotony. Steve is a brutal ovary punching ogre ready to take on the world. Now give me a world to take on.

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Source: http://bgbureau.com/3911/review-clam-of-champions-ps3

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