Once a plane is completed, you can return for special challenge rounds. These are indeed quite challenging, but the rewards in terms of experience and booty make them worth the effort. The goals for the challenges vary – in one case you may have to kill a certain number of enemies and in another defeat a series of bosses with a cap limit on the number of health potions that you can use.

With all of the fighting that you’ll be doing, it is a good thing that the controls are very well implemented. Control is smooth, responsive, and intuitive, and you’ll be able to thrown down potions, swap readied weapons, and unleash spells with ease. Like the other games in the family, the right stick can be used to quickly and smoothly rotate the camera angle so that you can get the best view of things as the action progresses.

A couple of players fights off waves of attackers online.

Graphically the game looks as good as its predecessors. The water and fire effects are still some of the best to be found in any game, and the environments take you from lava fields to wilderness to the requisite dungeons. Although the maps are all new, if you played Champions you will notice that some of the environmental and monster graphics have been recycled untouched from that game.

Return to Arms continues the Champions tradition of excellent online multiplayer support – with one major difference. This time out you can not use your single-player character online. You must create an account through Sony the first time that you go online so that your online character can be stored on their servers. On the plus side this means that you won’t run into players making use of character exploits or cheats. In addition to allowing you to venture into the game’s levels with a party of players, Return to Arms adds an arena mode where you can enjoy player versus player combat, either in team-based battles or solo slugfests.

If you played Champions you can just about view Return to Arms as an expansion game. You get a little bit of new packaged with a whole lot of old, so your enjoyment of this game is likely to be exactly what it was with Champions. If you’re new to the series you’ll have fun jumping right into Return to Arms, although if you’re looking for story you may want to go with the original game. So there you have it – love Champions, love Return to Arms, but if you’re tired of Champions Return to Arms won’t hold your interest for long.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 78%.  Hack and slash a-go-go. It’s a good game because the play is pretty much identical to an older good game.

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