The new MMO Champions Online from the creators of City of Heroes/Villains is almost finished. Soon every place between the equator and the poles will be crawling with superheroes. Here’s what we thought of the beta experience. (Obviously it’s no review of the final version, but from what we’ve seen so far it’s shaping up to be an exciting game although it’s far from a traditional RPG.)

Create Unique Heroes with the Champions Online Character Planner

The character creation aspects of Champions Online is what will supposedly separate it from other games in the genre – aside from the fact that it’s a world free from trolls and elves and instead based on superheroes. You can tweak every detail of your hero – if you want the power to smite your opponents with a hideous armpit-stench you got it (or something like that).



This is undoubtedly one of the game’s biggest strengths and actually makes it unique in the genre. In what other MMORPG does no two characters look the same? In Champions Online they don’t. It’s also fun to spend a couple of hours with the character creation kit just because it’s rewarding to know that your hero really is one of a kind.

Cover Lots More Ground

There are more than 900 missions in the game, and although many of them involve someone with an exclamation mark hovering over their head, there are also some novel ways of receiving quests, such as finding certain objects or being approached by someone in the street.

Compared to City of Heroes and City of Villains, the game world in this game is much larger. Other than Millennium City, you also get to visit deserts and tundras, plus Monster Island and the underwater world of Lamuria. Each of these areas are divided into subsections, so the total landmass has to be vast. Thankfully, you have some special Champions Online travel powers of which flying is one of the more mundane.

Make Your Own Bad Guy

Every superhero needs a nemesis, and a fun feature of Champions is that you also get to customize yours. It’s up to you to decide what his minions will be, what motivates his (presumably) evil quest for world domination and how he should fight. You’ll then get to face him every now and then until the eventual showdown. Naturally, there’s a system in the game to prevent you from making him unusually weak – he will evolve and gain levels just like your own character.

Set Out to Play in a Comic Book

The comic-book style, cell-shaded graphics suit this RPG well, and there’s never any doubt that this is exactly the plan. Every facet of the game design reminds you of classic Marvel or DC comics, and that’s arguably a fresh take on the whole RPG concept, even if I’ve come to be somewhat partial to the whole “orcs & elves” settings. In all, it’s a fresh MMO that will certainly capture its intended crowd.

Tags | Champions Online, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Cryptic, MMORPG