Champions Online

Champions Online = Super mediocre.

The description I devised for my Champions Online super-being Death Panel goes like this: "Workaholic bureaucrat Edgar Billings thought his service to his country ended when his head smashed through the windshield of his car and into an inconveniently placed tree. Little did Edgar know that at that very instant, Congress passed a diabolical piece of legislation that ripped him from the astral plane and sent him hurtling back towards Earth, hungry for paperwork. Wielding the Chains of Oligarhy, DEATH PANEL now hunts the terminally ill criminals of Millennium City. Looks like it's time to pull the plug... on crime."

I had fun writing it, and enjoyed creating Death Panel, who is sometimes a formally attired businessman and occasionally a colossal mummy-king. Unfortunately, life is a constant series of trials and frustrations, and one can no more sit eternally in Champions Online's character creator than drape a security blanket around their shoulders for their first day at school. No, you must eventually leave the relatively safe and warm cradle of the hero generator and step foot into Millennium City, and what you'll find there is an unfinished and altogether average massively multiplayer online role-playing game with halfhearted action-game trappings.

If you were one of those kids that used to mix sodas at McDonald's, you already have an ingrained knowledge of the intricacies of Champions Online's skill system. Sometimes, you'd stumble upon some wonderful new potion... other times, you wound up with a murky pool of rancid sewage. This is Champions' mix-a-skill system in a nutshell, and if you find a really good concoction, the developers will patch it into murky sewage soon enough. And unfortunately, thanks to the most punishing character re-spec system ever devised (where powers must be returned in the same order they were purchased, with ever-inflating costs), mistaken skill selections are all but permanent. But hey, all the more reason to head back into that character creator, where everything is good and nothing hurts.

Persevere and you'll be asking yourself a lot of frustration-prompted questions. For example, when is an auto-attack not an auto-attack? When it has a toggle switch, according to Cryptic Studios. Despite Champions Online's billing as an action-oriented game, I sometimes suspect that its engine simply can't keep up with a quick trigger finger. Animations tweak and skip, powers meant to be maintained (read: held down) fizzle with meager effect if you accidentally tap the button. Holding the block button may or may not throw your character into a guarded pose and deflect a good portion of enemy damage hurled your way, depending on if the game feels like it or not. Sure, heroes and villains are highly combat-mobile in comparison to standard stop-and-swing MMO battling, but system dysfunctions are common and infuriating.


And I haven't even mentioned the seemingly endless character-discombobulating crowd-control effects, like holds and knockbacks. Worst of all are the intangible holds -- so named, I think, because when intangibly held, you generally cannot see what the hell is happening to your character, and know only that they appear to be valiantly pantomiming the idea that they're locked in a deadly struggle with some unseen force. Also, a big purple bar that ought to read "mash button to continue enjoying game" appears under their writhing body just to piss you off, since mashing buttons is all you can really do at that point. So mash you will, as though your keyboard were a bongo drum, with an ever-present sense of impending dread for the charged-up power attack undoubtedly following hot on the heels of the lockdown. A large majority of my deaths occurred thanks to this hold-nuke-reset tactic.

Combine all of these combat quirks into one big lump and throw it into an instance with other players and you've got Champions Online's inane player-versus-player scenarios. PvP is a chaotic and annoying furball -- literally, sometimes -- of chain stuns and abusive travel powers. Pick a target and pound out your best combo, but be prepared for a dozen brands of inbound bondage to make your short life a living hell. Even if you're lucky enough to break free from your shackles long enough to do real damage, your opponent may just freely flit away using the Teleport travel power. And if none of these worst-case scenarios occur, you can assume that something else irritating will, because Champions Online is not (and should not be) balanced for PvP. The fact that the option even exists beyond basic dueling is absurd to me. Absurd, but not surprising: Much of Champions feels like MMO-by-rote, and if the checklist calls for PvP, then PvP there must be.


Similarly absurd: the randomly-named items my hero collected and equipped throughout his career. Why a superhero would need a Colossal Iron Lung I'll never know, but I toted one around for quite some time. Since Champions Online's character customization occurs at-will in the first few minutes you spend in the game, items -- by definition -- must not significantly alter your character's look. The best gear grants your hero new or altered powers, but the rest are essentially just extra stats to pad the spreadsheet that is your superhero. In fact, if I chose to continue playing Champions, I would not be surprised in the slightest to stumble across an item called Gargantuan Regenerative Database Entry. Its icon would be a pair of sunglasses, and it would probably suck. Hey, the checklist calls for items.

Anyone who's played an MMO knows that trouble is brewing when you're forced to start tackling quests too far above your character's level; early high-level quest completion is a recipe for content drought later on. This kind of problem is amateurish, and it didn't have to exist in Champions Online. But for some reason, a post-release patch kneecapped the experience rewards for many quests. In a game with little to do but grind missions, this is an extreme fun-crusher. Cryptic promises more quest content in an upcoming patch, but additional missions shouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

At level 28 and with scant few quests left to complete before the tedium of mob-grinding death-gripped my free time, my videocard killed itself. I choose to believe that it sacrificed its life that I might be spared the carpal tunnel syndrome laying before me, but I suppose we'll never know. Champions Online too often feels like a professionally assembled Second Life module, where character creation is king and the thrill of being superhuman wears thin once you realize that everything else just feels off. Whether or not future patches can set some of the more glaring flaws right is anybody's guess.

©2009-09-16, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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