Bloodline Champions hands-on preview

If Diablo and League of Legends had a lovechild, it might be a little something like Stunlock Studios' Bloodline: Champions.

Bloodline Champions is a player-versus-player (PvP) combat game that pits up to ten players (5v5) against each other in fast, furious action-oriented arena matches.

We've been spending some time in the closed beta (Beta Phase II). Read on for our impressions of this extremely promising, unique action-PvP game.

Let's get ready to rumble

After creating an account and logging in for the first time, you'll be greeted by a friendly tutorial that will walk you through how to play the game. Because the fundamental gameplay is pretty simple (action-RPG fans should feel right at home), the tutorials only take about 5-10 minutes to play and do a fine job of instructing you in the basics.

While the tutorial teaches you the basics, however, every champion that you can play in the game is unique, and the only real way to get good with one is to play them a lot—which generally means experimenting (and probably dying/losing a lot) until you understand the character.

Fortunately, a Practice Mode in which you play against Bots is planned, and should greatly help acclimating to new characters before playing live against other players.

Let mortal combat begin...

Your goal in Bloodline Champions is basically to enter the arena and crush your enemies. This generally involves killing them to the death (repeatedly).

In addition to straight team deathmatch arenas, there are also Capture the Artifact and objective-based Conquest modes as well. Deathmatch games tend to run very quickly—no one respawns (you can resurrect fallen team mates, but it's timely and seldom successful), and the first team to win 4 rounds wins the match. Each round typically takes less than 5 minutes.

Bloodline Champions concept art: The Alchemist

Meet the Bloodlines

In the beta we've been given access to 16 different champions, divided equally amongst 4 classes:  Healers, Ranged Damage dealers, Melee damage dealers, and Tanks. More champions will be unveiled in the coming months.

Champions are controlled with the mouse from an isometric viewpoint, and each champion has 6 unique abilities. Left-clicking is your basic ranged or melee attack (depending on the character), with your other powers bound to the right mouse button, the spacebar, and the Q, E, and F keys (by default). In addition, every character can use F1 to heal themselves, and F2 to resurrect a fallen comrade. Both of these abilities require a few seconds to activate, however, so you have to find brief refuge from the fray to use them—usually difficult, but not impossible.

Champion abilities vary widely and it takes at least a few games to get a good handle on how to play one. Some characters have more support-oriented abilities, such as healing, buffing allies, or temporarily freezing, stunning or slowing enemies. Others are more straight forward—The Vanguard (a Tank), for example, has lots of health and a strong melee attack, complimented by a Taunt ability that pulls enemies to him. He also has a charging shield slam to cover ground quickly, and a modest ranged attack.

Bloodline Champions concept art: The Nomad

Most abilities are multifaceted, and have additional effects beyond just inflicting damage. Some may slow your target briefly, or inflict more damage if you successfully score a string of hits, for example. Abilities also have cooldown times, which is generally 3-7 seconds depending on how powerful the ability is.

Finally, every character also has a unique 'ultimate' ability (F-key by default). The ultimate ability can only be triggered after a character has dealt enough damage and/or used their abilities successfully enough (i.e. affected a target).  Generally, this means most characters can (and will) fire off their ultimate ability toward the middle or end of a match. It's no guarantee of victory, but all ultimate powers are fun to watch and devastating when they hit.

Still to come

As you play Bloodline Champions you gain experience and rise in level. For the closed beta, however, gaining levels doesn't provide anything in terms of in-game abilities or perks. You can create games and restrict entry to games based on a player's level, but that's all. Achievements, titles, avatars, and other unspecified perks are forthcoming.

Competitive players should also find plenty of competition in ladders, tournaments, and similar events after the game launches.

Overall Impressions 

Briefly, Bloodline Champions is brilliantly simple, fun, and quick to play—particularly for any fan of action-RPGs. Part of the true beauty of the game is that it's very easy to log in and play for as little as 15-30 minutes, which should make it an excellent game for core and casual players alike. Stunlock may need to do a little front-end work to help divide the two communities to keep the game equally appealing to core and 'noob'/casual players.

Pricing for the game hasn't been revealed, nor has a specific release date. The Bloodline Champions FAQ indicates that some form of digital download will be the likely distribution method, which makes sense because the game is purely a multiplayer game.