Champions Online review

Who would suspect that mild-mannered games journalist Sam McCall was in fact MechaGanesha, cybernetic demon-banisher extraordinaire.

Following on from Cities of Heroes and Villains, the latest superhero-based action MMORPG has landed on the block. Cryptic's Champions Online aims to deliver a more immersive and versatile experience than its predecessor, and while it's still in its early days, the signs so far are very promising indeed.

Much has been made of the extensive and open-ended character creation system, and with good reason. If you're the kind of person who sat doodling superheroes in the margins of your exercise books when you should really have been learning about crop rotation in the 18th century, then all your hard work was not in vain.

Champions Online allows you to customise everything, from the shape and size of your hero to every last detail of their costume. From lycra-clad Marvel types to heavily-armoured mechanoids, sharp-suited gunslingers to mythical creatures, it's easy to spend hours just designing every hero you've ever conceived - or hitting the 'randomise' button and taking it from there. With the ability to unlock further designs in-game and the promise of even more combinations to come, this is one of the deepest yet easy-to-tweak generators I've ever seen.

Rather than choosing a character class, you begin by choosing two basic powers out of 18 mostly combat-focused disciplines. From there developing your hero is up to you: as you gain levels, you can choose powers from any school as long as you meet the requirements. This freeform approach can be confusing to begin with, and leads to frustration when you soldier on with a character for a dozen levels or so before admitting you've made a duff class and starting again. However, it's also one of the best aspects of the game.

A short tutorial scenario begins the game proper, pitting your nascent hero against endless waves of aliens infesting a ravaged metropolis. In theory, this is where you learn the basics of the game: and you do, providing you're prepared to read and remember every line of text the 'helper' NPCs have to say. In reality, you're probably going to be flitting between the game and the internet for a bit while you work out how to do things - maybe I'm inexperienced with MMORPGs, but I found the learning curve to be pretty steep.

Once you get to grips with the controls and other, more obscure elements such as item creation, Champions Online gradually becomes a blast to play. Battling armies of henchmen, with multi-coloured superpowers going off all around you, looks and feels great, although the slightly clunky targeting can be a pain in hectic fights. Following the tutorial, the difficulty ramps up quickly - but rather than being frustrating, the process of finding the best uses for your newly-acquired powers is hugely satisfying, lending a genuine feeling of progression and achievement.

While not exactly gorgeous, the sprawling environments have a chunky, suitably comic-book look to them. Unlocking your character's travel power - which allows you to fly, leap or even dig around the map - really opens up the game world, allowing you to soar over irradiated deserts and zombie-infested wildernesses to your heart's content. The ability to jump from one location to another whenever you want, leaving uncompleted missions on the back burner, further enhances the open-ended feeling.

As in most RPGs, quests are dispensed through encounters with a series of hapless NPCs who need a hero to do everything from finding their buddies to rescuing lost cats. These tend to be of a fairly short-lived and generic stock: defeating X amounts of a certain type of enemy or collecting particular items, but they're fast and fun and punchy in keeping with the rest of the game. After a while (and this can be viewed as a criticism) I stopped reading the dialogue and just relied on the quest prompts to tell me what to do next. There's not much of a feeling of involvement in the game world beyond running from place to place and ticking boxes, but somehow I didn't mind - the real meat of the game is in advancing and tweaking your hero, and the quests are a means to that end.

Of course, one of the prime facets of an MMORPG like this is the ability to interact with other players. Rather than joining a server a la WoW, Champions Online has a series of huge instanced zones in which everybody plays together. Here you can watch everybody else toddle around completing their quests; you can join up with others to combine your powers or slug it out against another team in the arena deathmatch mode, which is frantic, tactical and great fun.

Champions Online has the makings of a rich (in a variety rather than a story sense) yet pacy and hugely playable action MMORPG. Since the game is in its relative youth, I've overlooked some of the annoying bugs I came across - untargetable enemies, ugly black patches on the map, quests which seem to trigger for no reason - in the hope that these will be tidied up in the months to come. If you like supes and role-playing and aren't too fussy about completing endless identikit mini-quests, suit up and dive in.

8.5/10

Sam McCall