Needs Some Work, But Great Customization
Champions Online, the second superhero MMO from game developer Cryptic Studios, has been out for a few years now. Long enough that it's developers can't really be excused for the ongoing, long-term issues the game has had- but it's not all bad. There's a good game in here, if you're willing to look. Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't have enough staying power.
When Everyone's Super, Nobody Will Be
The biggest issue with Champions Online is simple- it's build viability. Though the game espouses this whole concept of customization and making exactly the sort of character each individual player wants to create, everyone gravitates towards a simple, effective build- Tankmages. A tankmage, for the uninitiated to the realm of MMO terminology, are characters with high defense and high offense, capable of handling any number of situations on their own. And while Champions certainly allows for lots of different types of these builds, such as combining Fire based attacks with Regeneration, or using Wind and Ice with Invulnerability, or even swords and shotguns with just the ability to dodge things, they all play roughly the same. While this makes a single playthrough of the game's content a pretty novel experience, on the second character you make, a few things become quickly apparent.
Firstly, you're either going to be a DPS character or a Tank character. Nothing else. Any attempts at something more versatile will simply set you somewhere along the scale between DPS and Tank, being a defensive DPS or an offensive Tank, but nothing that feels truly unique. The game has no true Crowd Control role, Buff and Healing characters are basically pointless due to the high defense or regeneration that even DPS characters can possess, and the jack-of-all-trades rules supreme. The best one can attempt is a pet-only build, which is unfortunately kind of... unmanageable. Unlike City of Heroes and it's Mastermind archetype, Champions doesn't offer players enough control over their pets to really have any specific control over their behaviors.
Secondly, it will begin to dawn on the player that basically everything in the game feels the same when you're playing it. Melee attacks feel like every other melee attack, and ranged attacks feel like every other ranged attack. There's not a lot of satisfaction to most attacks(though certain ones like Roomsweeper have a nice heft to them), and ultimately any given character is basically as worth playing as any other character. There's little to no incentive to have more than one or two characters, as once you've got a DPS and a Tank you can switch between, you don't need anything else.
Which is a shame, because the game's focus seems to be on making tons of unique characters.
But Here's The Good Part
Champions Online may have lots of failings when it comes to gameplay, but the character creator is top-notch. Building on the concepts put forth in City of Heroes, Champions Online offers even more categories of clothing, armor, and spandex, more places where players can attach things than they'll know what to do with, and body sliders that let the player do things like make tiny, bobble-headed characters or huge, lanky, scrawny Slendermen, as well as the more traditional superhero body types like your bodybuilders and Hulks.
The one problem with the sliders is unfortunately a big one, though. When making a female character, there's no way to resize the waist. The 'waist' slider, weirdly enough, adjusts the width of the hips. While males can scale from small child up through hulking monstrosity, women are stuck with a weird wasp waist no matter what the rest of them looks like. It's possible to hide this with armor or the right outfit, but players shouldn't have to resort to that sort of thing. Cryptic would correct this issue in later games like Star Trek Online and Neverwinter, but they've never gone back and fixed it. All they'd have to do is add a slider. Come on, Cryptic.
Even moreso than City of Heroes, though, and far more than DC Universe Online, Champions Online lets players create the character they want. Which is great. It'd be better if they played uniquely, but oh well.
Free to Play. No, really. For Real This Time.
In lots of Free to Play titles, they basically mean 'free to try out, but you'll be dropping money on this if you want to really play the game'. Champions Online, like Star Trek Online, avoids that. All of the game's content is available to free players, and the only major restriction is that there's no free access to the 'Freeform' style of making characters- that is, you'll be using premade 'Archetype' builds. But even within those, it's likely players will find something they're interested in, and in many cases the Archetype builds are actually more powerful than the Freeform builds can manage to be, even with min-maxing in mind.
Players can buy additional character slots, costume parts, new Archetypes, even special personal spaces called Hideouts and a number of different vehicles for their character to fly around in. Things are pretty reasonably priced, with the only truly expensive thing being the 'Freeform Slots', which are about $50 each- or free in unlimited quantities to subscribers. There's also methods players can use to earn the cash shop currency in-game, although it'll take most players quite a while to be able to afford anything substantial. The way the system is designed basically prevents any hardcore currency grinding, so it's more of a long-term-goal than something to sweat about.
Overall, Champions Online works in a lot of ways, but isn't entertaining enough at it's core to last for long. If you like superheroes and flying around and making your own crazy dudes, the game's worth trying out, but don't expect it to hold you for the long term. Once you reach Lv40, that's basically it- you've seen everything there is to see and done everything there is to do. For some people, they can do that over and over, but for most... that's where you'll stop playing.
But it's a fun ride up until that point, for sure.
