Champions Online Preview

You can even tweak the hue of your powers

Despite the fact that I could have spent hours in the hero creation tool, it was time to finally enter the game world and play the game. Champions Online’s opening couple of levels will play out similarly for everyone – Millennium City, the futuristic metropolis built on the ruins of Detroit following its destruction by the lore's main villain Doctor Destroyer, is under attack from an alien race called the Qularr. All hell is breaking loose – the local police force and armed response units are struggling under the weight of the invasion, and it’s your job, along with all the other new players, to help out.

The first thing that strikes you is the art style. Cryptic has gone for a comic book style, with bright, bold colours outlined in thick black lines. It looks like a comic book, which is great, because it fits. Your first few hours of play are a combination of fetch quests – go here, kill X amount of enemies, grab X amount of loot – and escort quests. Pretty uninspiring, simple and easy stuff, but it does afford you the time to get accustomed to the combat and the controls.

As a Might hero, my two starting super powers were “Clobber” and “Beatdown”. By targeting an enemy and clicking the tooltip for Clobber or tapping the associated hotkey, my character simply does the action, doing damage. But the main purpose of this first power is to generate energy. Energy is used for the more powerful, er, powers. In my case, this was Beatdown. It hits a single target with one strong punch, doing good damage.

This premise is the foundation of Champions Online’s simple but engaging combat system. You’ll be doing some powers to generate energy so that you can do others. Layered on top of this is an interesting charge system. Some powers, like the “Mighty Leap”, require you to hold down the hotkey, triggering the filling up of a meter. It’s up to you when to release, sending your character leaping after an enemy and stunning them for a short time.

The combat is a simple combination of blocking and building up energy for powerful attacks

There's also a Block ability – assigned to the Shift key. As enemies charge up their more powerful attacks, an icon will display above their head. Press Block in time and you'll escape most if not all of the damage. There are some powers you can buy that are Block specific – triggering combos for example.

The missions in Millennium City are initially uninspiring, but things soon pick up when you find yourself in your first “open quest”. Set outside the Champions HQ, this open quest takes its cues from Warhammer Online’s excellent public quest system. You join in simply by entering the area. Champions Online’s open quests, like WAR’s PQs, are divided up into stages that get progressively harder. Here, all you need to do is fend off some more invading aliens as famed Champions hero Ironclad works on preparing a huge gun that’ll blow the Qularr mothership to smithereens. We’d almost say Cryptic nicked the open quest idea from Mythic, but then every developer nicks a little bit from someone when they create games, so we’ll let them off.

Once completed, you enter your first instance – a joint effort inside the HQ with iconic Champions hero Defender. You run about killing Doctor Destroyer’s robots and face off against a mini-boss of sorts. After that the gun is fired, the mothership is destroyed and you exit the HQ to a guard of honour from all the NPCs you helped out along the way. Absolutely, unequivocally, sweet.

Them you get to do something you only normally get to do in other MMOs when you’re two thirds of the way towards the level cap – fly. It’s called a “Talent” power in Champions Online. You don’t have to pick fly – you can pick tunnel, or super leaps, or super speed, or Spider-Man-style swinging, or all the other classic superhero methods of transportation, but really there’s only one choice. That you get to fly so soon in Champions Online seems incredibly generous, almost devaluing the experience really. But it’s welcome. Very welcome.