“Bloodline Champions” (BLC) is a video game sort of like “Defense of the Ancients” and “League of Leagues”. On drugs. Like meth. And ecstasy. And just about every other drug you can find.

BLC is a free, real time, strategy game (RTS) created by Stunlock Studios. The game is solely player-versus-player (PVP) based. Basically, the main idea of BLC is that a player goes into a subgame, fights for a good six to ten minutes, and then there’s a winner. One can find a game by going into a lobby or going into a competitive match matching system. Once the player finds the game, the player picks a bloodline to play with. There are four types of bloodlines: Tank, Melee, Healer, and Ranged. Each archetype has their own role in the battlefield. The Tank is the one that absorbs most of the damage. The Healer provides a temporary health boost for teammates. The Melee and Ranged deal out damage to the enemies. Once everyone picks a bloodline, they fight.

There are three game modes:  Arena, Capture the Artifact, and Conquest. Arena is your normal death match type of game, where one team of players tries to kill the other team. Conquest deals with trying to control points on a map. Capture the Artifact is like the intel in “Team Fortress 2.” A person tries to steal an artifact and bring it back to the base. After the game, the player receives Blood Coins to use in the game marketplace, which unlock bloodlines, outfits, weapons, and other stuff.

The game play is fun for first time users. The games go by quickly, which means that you don’t have to sit at a computer for hours in order to play a game you know you’ve already lost. The game does not use mana in order to calculate what skills a player can use. Instead, there are only cool down timers. Additionally, the game is solely based on skill, not luck. There are no critical hits or passive abilities. The player has to aim manually with the mouse in order to hit the enemy. The reply value is ok.

The casual gamer can play for hours on end, but for what? Sure, you can play in the competitive leagues that they have in game, but what if you don’t want to go competitive? There are no other rewards. The only way to be rewarded for staying for a long time is to become a competitive player, and that’s not right.

The graphics and sound are average. They do the job, but I’m not exactly attracted to it. The scenery of the arenas and the design of the bloodlines suggest that the time period is before modern times. I wish that the arenas were brightened up a tad more. Not every arena has to have a dark, drab feeling. A problem with the sound is that the bloodlines grunt the exact same way every time a player uses a skill, and it gets annoying.

One last comment about the game is about the community. The community is very young, because the game went into open beta around December 2010. Most players come from Europe, so maybe the game should try to attract more people from the USA and Asia.

The game is okay for beginners with small attention spans and experts in the RTS realm. The beginner will learn the new skills, while experts will fine tune their talents.

To learn more about the game, click here!

Reggie Kwok can be reached at [email protected]