Game-Pad©

Here's Part 2 of our Champions Online Early Impressions. If you haven't already, you can read Part 1 here!

When you finally do get set free from tutorials and crises, you get to see the true scale of Champions Online. There are now three huge zones you can explore (Millennium City, the Desert and Canada), each of which has a number of areas suitable for champions of different level ranges. As heroes reach the higher levels of the game, additional zones including the Moon, Monster Island and an underwater city are also accessible.

The general story of the game is that Dr Destroyer, the world’s most evil and powerful supervillain isn’t as dead as people think he is. The Champions need all the help they can get to prevent his return, and many of the missions relate back to this in one way or another. The missions I’ve completed so far have been varied and kept my interest peaked, with objectives ranging from retrieving stolen goods and taking out gang bosses to giving medical aid and saving people from burning buildings. Each zone offers a number of “open missions” where players simply go along at any time without the need to talk to an NPC and fight with others to, for example, take down a giant killer robot.

There are also plenty of different types of villains to keep you on your heroic toes, including ice zombies, radiation freaks, demons and petty criminals. I’ve yet to get bored or stuck with nothing to do for too long in this game, and it shows no signs of slowing down for me just yet. I should warn you though that there have been complaints of content gaps in the later levels and not much of an endgame, so I don’t know how much there is out there for 2 or 3 alts in addition to a main character.

No MMO is complete without PvP, which is why CO offers a number of different modes for you to take on your fellow heroes. Duel does exactly what it says on the tin – you can challenge another player anywhere in the world apart from the Powerhouse (where you learn now powers and abilities) and Club Caprice (Millennium City’s top hero nightclub) and fight to the death. Next up is Ultimate Tournament of Champions (UTC) where two teams of heroes are pitted against each other in cage matches. At higher levels the PvP apparently gets a bit deeper. There’s the free-for-all open B.A.S.H. area of Westside in Millennium City, and the objective driven Apocalypse mode. Despite all of this, the PvP currently seems a bit imbalanced. The duels and UTC matches I played were fun enough, but it is irritating when teleporters simply slip away when they get scared, and some powers seem a lot more effective than others even when everyone is set to the same level during matches. In my opinion if a power set works in PvE it should work just as well in PvP, I don’t want to have to pick my powers for one or the other. Hopefully these issues will be addressed before too long.

Graphically I have no complaints, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from such a large scale game, but it does the job. It may be a bit more colourful and cartoony than some MMOs since it is set in a comic book superhero world rather than a fantasy one. One feature which I particularly like is the optional black outline around characters and objects, making you feel like you really are in a comic! The general performance also seems pretty reliable, with very little lag in my experience apart from one particularly bad case in a PvP match. I do occasionally get a server not responding error, but that may be as much to do with my unreliable router and internet connection as with the game itself!

Even after a long 2-part article there are still loads of features I haven’t even touched on, but we’ll leave those for the full review! The game has only been out for around a month and all MMOs have their problems at the beginning. As it is, CO has been fun and addictive for hours of gameplay. If Cryptic keeps on top of the tweaks, listens to the community and offers a similar flow of major updates and events to CoH/CoV, I’m sure Champions Online will hold the interest of many players for years to come.

My initial rating for this game is 8.0/10, but you’ll have to wait for the full review for Game-Pad’s official verdict!

Still want to see more of the game? Check out Strite's open beta videos in this forum thread!