by Stow on Jan 19, 2011
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style="font-style: italic;">And yes, there's a ton of
achievements to be had here. Only unlike every other game,
getting them earns you real currency to spend in the shop!
This game is not rated by the ESRB. It has a very passionate community that loves to win, so some words will be exchanged from time to time and the occasional blood fountain for an overkill. Tiny things aside, this game is good to go for everyone to enjoy.
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style="font-style: italic;">One thing to notice is the
actual size difference. Size does affect your vulnerability
to projectiles and your hitbox, so size DOES matter in Bloodline
Champions.
In a game as intense as Bloodline Champions, the graphics can get in the way of the actual combat. The team at Stunlock Studios did a wonderful job of making the game flashy for a top-down perspective, but simple enough to see exactly where attacks are coming from and what attack they are before they hit, so you can dodge them or activate counterattacks. There is no what the hell just hit me moment, unlike a lot of arena games or games like Heroes of Newerth for new players. While the game does look good in motion, screenshots look pretty plain and this isnt a game youre going to show off to your friends for its graphical qualities.
One of the things they nailed, oddly enough, is the combat text mid-combat. Its the perfect size and duration on screen. It lets you know youre affected by buffs or debuffs, the stack amount, and disappears shortly afterwards. So many games make it difficult to see the strength or amount of debuffs in play, but this game does it quite well. Its pretty important since every character has a way to make big red words appear over anothers head, and some many at once!
All of the attacks have good audio cues to indicate impact, flight, and channeling. Since the battlefield is wide, some attacks will be happening off screen and you arent totally left out due to the good sound effects. Everyone has laughs and gloating for getting killing blows too, even the healers! The music that accompanies the combat could use a little more variety, but the themes themselves arent bad by any means. If anything theyre more energetic than youd expect, and are probably the best in the arena combat genre, though thats not saying much.
The biggest problem with Bloodline Champions, is oddly enough, the pricing scheme and availability. Its a good game, theres no doubt about it, but if you are new to the game you get to work with 4 of the 20 available champions at the moment. Thats 20 percent of the game, basically. You get from 20 to 90 blood coins after a match, and how much is it to unlock a new character? Seventeen thousand. 17,000. Discarding achievements, that's a lot of matches for one character. Holy shit. After doing some calculations, I could grind out the highest costing champions in League of Legends faster than a new champion in Bloodline Champions more than likely.
But of course, if youre fine with waiting for the free rotation for your variety, you will spend nothing and get your moneys worth and then somefree fun! You can purchase individual heroes and such with Funcom Points purchased with cash, and there are two editions available for purchase that come with multiple heroes, or in the Titan editions case, all of them. The downside is the up front cost of $29.99 and $89.99 are fairly steep for a game of this nature. This isnt a deep game. Youre not going to grind here, youre going to fire it up, play a few games for fun, and likely go back to Alterac Valley
or play a game while queued for it.
You have to constantly evaluate
the situation. You don't just pile on the enemy healer in
this, they're very good at keeping themselves alive!
With the game newly released and the
first patch coming out
in a matter of days, the support of Funcom and Stunlock Studios seems
to be in
full force. In
order to make a game like
this work, they need to constantly be updating the balance and adding
the occasional
new character to add additional depth to the selection and team makeup. But with 20 heroes
available at launch and
the infinite possibilities of how a match can actually play out, this
will stay
installed for a long time for those who enjoy it.
Pros:
Pretty damn good for what it is--fast paced arena combat. Good interface, and the graphics don't get in the way ofCons
...but the rate you earn the in-game currency is pathetic. Some questionable balance, but it'll likely be fixed soon. A few ultimates can instantly win the game if they hit thePunching healers in the face is fun, pulling people across the map is fun, cutting people up from behind is fun Stunlock Studios basically took everything good about arena and hero combat and put it all together into one game. They removed the grind, the items, the buildup and everyone is on the same level playing field. Want to play another character? Select it. You dont start at level 1 and have to grind to 85 in this. Perhaps most of all, this game is an absolute blast to play as a coordinated team in. Putting together a beatdown on a player before they can even react will never get old, and for that reason Bloodline Champions wont for a long time!