There are a lot of Free MMORPGs out there these days, enough so that gamers ought to be particular about which ones they play. What title is worth their time, energy, and interest? Champions Online is a worthy contender in several respects, but falls short of being that must-have game, the one that you can’t seem to put down. Still, if you’re craving a rowdy button-smasher, or a universe positively dripping with comic-book culture, then Champions Online is definitely worth the download.
The first thing you’ll encounter in Champions is the character creation screen, where you’ll probably spend the next thirty minutes gawking at the menagerie of character options. Die-hard comic book fans will find that they can recreate most of their favorites (I made a Hulk and Hawkeye just for fun), while those who want to go with a custom build will find the system immensely rewarding. Beyond choosing your archetype—be it the power of ice, flame, firearm, or any other of the ten available—you will be able to define your characters face and body type in great detail, not to mention their costume. In all the hours I’ve played Champions Online, I’ve yet to see the same costume twice, and that’s really saying something. In a genre where so much of a character’s identity is at stake in their appearance, uniqueness is the key, and it’s a point Cryptic hit square on the nose here. Often I was more engaged in the fact that I was a 300 pound, five-foot dude in a pink bunny costume than I was in my current objective or next skill acquisition.
As you progress through the game, you’ll have similar freedom in choosing your skills, so if you’ve always wanted to see what kind of damage Superman could have done with an M16, now’s your chance. That being said, the more you stray from the archetype builds, the more difficult progression becomes. To put it bluntly, your character is largely ineffective when you spread your points around too much, and the experience quickly deteriorates, a sore disappointment if you imagined the game as an end-all in super-hero creation. Still, it’s possible to mold the recommended builds to your liking, and you can end up with buffs and skills that resemble something darn close to what you may have been picturing. Imagine my delight when bunny-eared Doctor Furry gained the ability to super-hop hundreds of feet in the air as his main mode of transportation.
Luckily, that transportation skill comes early in the game, because you’ll need to do a lot of leaping/flying/teleporting about to complete various quests and reach new zones. The Champions’ world is sizeable considering it isn’t heavily fragmented into instances. It’s just there, waiting for you to come tearing through faster than a speeding bullet. The effect is positive—it adds to the impression that you’re but a small part of larger world—but it can make finding items or locations a bit clunky, especially when you’re sure you standing on your map’s marker when you don’t see an entrance or enemy in the vicinity. These moments are frustrating but never impossible to work through, and the freedom to go bounding through the world that is Champions Online is well worth the price of admission.
Which brings us to the game’s second strength—its art design. From the moment you set foot in Millenium City, it’s apparent that a ton of love and dedication went into creating Cryptic’s Universe. The world is a comic book brought to life. The engine uses bright colors and cell-shading to achieve its illustrated look, and the effect carries over well to both the characters and architecture. Friendly NPCs and baddies are fluidly animated and look the part (I swear nearly every police officer has Commissioner Gordon’s mustache), and Millenium City feels like a carefully crafted love letter to Metropolis. The city and its outlying areas are beautiful, detailed, and a joy to explore.
The writing is on par with the visuals, a point made clear from the get-go. The introductory mission places you on at the site of alien invasion in Millenium City, and it’s in resolving the conflict this you’ll learn the ropes. As the episode unfolds, you’ll be called on to smash the alien insectoids to a pulp, gather city defense codes, launch a particularly beefy super hero out of a cannon and into the alien mother-ship, and defeat the evil villain behind the whole plot. The elements smack of classic, over-the-top comic goodness, and they’re delivered quite well, bolstered by the pitch-perfect writing. At times the content in Champions is a bit lacking (was there no better idea for an enemy group besides the plain, unreasonably angry, “Purple Gang,” for instance?), but the delivery is always on point.
The real draw on Champions Online is the combat, though. Through and through, the person who will enjoy this game the most is the person who enjoyed dungeon crawlers like Diablo or Titan Quest. As I mentioned earlier, button-mashers need look no further for a game to break their keyboards. The game sports a rather frantic combat system, where your character might be dealing with one villain and several henchmen at a time. It rewards rigorous spamming, as basic attacks will provide energy for even more devastating commands. To balance the mash-fest, Cryptic has incorporated a block function, which can be used to deflect enemy special attacks, or reduce damage taken. This has to be done manually, and it works well to add excitement and variety to encounters. The result is a fast-paced, brutal onslaught, the kind of action where you’ll mow through fifty enemies in five minutes. As such, it can seem like a lot of kills before your next skill advancement, and when those upgrades only come every few levels, the game can become a bit exhausting.
It doesn’t help that Champions is a bit light on content. Every character will go through the same missions and story, a shortfall made even more disappointing when you consider it against the vast options for character creation. Even a few archetype-specific missions could have gone a long way in making the game a little more complete. As it is, the game comes off as a bit flat, never straying too far from standard kill and collect quests. Things remain on this plateau until around level 25, at which point you’re able to create a nemesis. Your sworn enemy can be as outlandish as your hero (making for some decidedly exciting/hilarious moments), and the random encounters thereafter add a feeling of excitement and unpredictability that are lacking until that point. On the whole, though, the quest-side of gameplay is hampered by unintuitive menus, repetitious content, and lackluster rewards. The story is well-written and fitting to the universe, but ultimately falls short of providing an experience that could extend gameplay past the fifty hour mark, at which point you suspect (correctly) that you’ve seen everything Champions Online has to offer.
And as for its ‘online’ elements—the community, the competitive play, the team-based quests—well, they fall short, too, which is a real pity. Champions Online has the potential to be a great resource for community—imagine a bunch of comic book fans dressed up as their ideal hero and hanging out together—but the experience feels empty. It’s not that you never see other players, or do team-based missions. The issue is that once you do find a group or dungeon, the experience is over before you know it. When it can take upwards of thirty minutes to get a group together, having the mission complete in a flash is sorely disappointing. Competitive play, for its part, is stripped of any meaning or complexity. If you want to fight other players, you go to one of the game’s five arenas. End of story.
So the question remains, is Champions Online worth your time, memory allocation, and bandwidth? If you’re a comic book fan, absolutely. If you’re looking for a game to log into every so often to beat the ever-loving life out of a couple masked goons, then definitely. If you’re looking for a digital world to call your second home, where you can make friends, complete complicated quests, contribute to a bustling economy, well, I suggest you run in the opposite direction. Champions Online is worth your time, just not that much of it. Even hardcore super-hero aficionados will find themselves growing restless before too long. Still, you can’t beat the price, and there’s something to be said for crushing thugs underfoot while dressed in a pink bunny costume.
Rating: 7.0
Robert Lamirande
