Champions is a ton of fun... for a few months.

User Rating: 5.5 | Champions Online PC
By MMOaddict2009 | Review Date:
An ambitious big brother to City of Heroes, Champions Online tries to go more in depth with higher detail and more freedom and in many regards succeeds. The new powerset system offers total freedom, obliterating once and for all any kind of class system. At first blush, it looks as though you are selecting a class by virtue of the powerset you choose, but any time spent moving through the higher levels will quickly teach you A) you will likely have to take powers from a second, or even third, set, B) You can respec (or as they call it, Retcon) back to start and completely change every power and talent and C) the best specs are comprised of the chinese restaurant menu; some from column a, some from column b and so on. The best specs are an unusual amalgum of many sets combined in unexpected ways. However, the more you play the more you disover that total freedom can also spell a lack of direction for the player and the forums are alight with possible spec combos without any definitive idea of what truly might be max dps.
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The devs have tried, weakly, to institute the trinity system but team play, when it rarely occurs, is haphazard and more a test of how many times you can die and return rather than work together and succeed. But the team play, even when handled by the best of players, is too often thwarted by the innumerable bugs encountered. Glitched mobs, vanishing bosses, treadmilling minions and a host of other problems impede gameplay in most of the 5-man content. Vowing to fix an array of bugs, Cryptic patches the game regularly but invariable fails to fix the bugs on their patch notes while at the same time installing new bugs they hadn't even expected from their fixes.
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The character creation system, much like CoH, is the real draw and the only bug-free experience (usually). I've never seen such a robust system that allows for a seemingly infinite number of unique toons. Once created, your toon can go to one of two starting zones. Smart players work between the two zones, completing every quest to emerge at level 10. But the choices end there. Once you've done this, your future toons are subjected to the same zones and quests over and over, and there is definitely no new ground broken with questing. Kill X mobs, collect Y items (with large totals and rare drop rates!), escort and protect, and assassinate boss Z are the questlines, the usual fare for the unimaginitive MMO. Some quest hubs are definitely, fun, however. Infiltrating various military installations, for example, really give you a superhero / superspy gameplay feel but, again, if you've done it once, you've done it a thousand times. In a game where you WANT to make a ton of creative, diverse characters they have given you a repetitive, unremarkable world to play them in. While the character creator definitely urges you to make more toons, the gameworld surely deters you.
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Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, by the time you get to around level 35, you find yourself simply bored. The repetitive quests don't get much more interesting, the 5-mans get truly buggy, and the tradeskills you finally max prove of little value -or fun. Most people seem to make it two or three months and then start looking for a newcomer to give their belongings to, vowing to check back some day next year to see if anything's improved. If you're looking for a fun diversion for a couple of months, go ahead and grab CO. But if its the "next addiction" you seek, with immersive gameplay, gripping story, robust combat and intricate professions you're going to have to wait for another game to hit the shelves; Champions Online is simply not it.

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