‘Champions’ plagued by problems

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Oct 16, 2009

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At first, it’s hard not to love “Champions Online.” You start with the incredible customization offered by the character creation system – it’s almost complex enough to be a game by itself – and then move right on to stopping a good, old-fashioned alien invasion. The combat is more dynamic than in most massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), and as you level up, you find that the power customization is almost as flexible as the character design. Picking new abilities is fun, and the combat/mission system is a tolerable enough way to gain levels.

The system works well … for a while. The first real problem you’re likely to have is the stark monotony of the missions. In what has come to be the industry standard for quests, every mission is a variation on the themes of “Go kill those guys” and “Go click on those things.” Sometimes you might use a device to kill the guys, and sometimes you might be killing the guys to collect the parts for the Cybernetic Recombobulator, but what you’re actually doing is identical.

As long as you’ve got a stream of new abilities to test out on villains, this is fine, but once you’ve gotten used to the power of the day, it devolves rapidly into a standard grind. None of the other gameplay components do much to resolve this. Crafting is too simplistic to be interesting, and the player vs. player option is only fun relative to the rest of the game.

But perhaps you’re not here for strictly fun gameplay, maybe you just really want to feel like a superhero in a large, complex world of other heroes. Here, too, “Champions” slowly fails you. While it does a good job of talking about you as though you are a renowned hero from the outset, it contradicts this feeling by the fact that a bunch of simple criminals with guns can take you out, as long as their level is higher than yours. And I don’t think that the latest issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” would sell very well if Peter spent two-thirds of the issue standing in a line of superheroes as they waited for some hostages to respawn.

Even better, later in the game, citizens will run up to you with random missions such as asking you to go into the sewers and kill some guys. The problem is that the experience rewards for these don’t increase very quickly, and you end up in a situation where your character, a paragon of justice, has to say something to the effect of “Sorry, sir. I’d like to go stop that bomb, but it’s all the way across town, and I just don’t think you could make it worth my while.”

Alright, then, say none of that matters and your just here for the massively multiplayer part of the game. You’ll fare somewhat better, as it really is a lot of fun to group up. On the other hand, it’s almost always fun to play with people, and “Champions” doesn’t do much that you can’t find anywhere else. The game doesn’t scale well, either, and outside of a few missions that are designed for a team, you’ll quickly find the group experience to be far too easy.

There are a few good points that I’ve skipped, like the Nemesis system – which allows you some limited freedom in creating you own supervillain to face – or the variety and early appearance of travel powers. Unfortunately, these are offset by all the bad points that I haven’t mentioned: the ubiquitous glitches, the unbalanced powers, and the cruel, almost mocking system by which you change out powers you’ve already purchased.

“Champions Online” is an MMO. That means it might be vastly different in a year, or it might be gone altogether. What currently exists, though, is probably not worth your time. There are better action games, better MMO’s, and better superhero games out there. Unless you really want all three in one place, you can probably give “Champions” a pass for now.