Review: Champions Online

By Jeffrey Philipp | September 30, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Reviews | Tags: Atari, champions online, cryptic studios, review

In my opinion the most obvious and visible problem is that of balancing. The free form classless system of power selection and character creation has several sharp and ragged edges. A player who has just broken the shrink wrap seal of the box, or finished their digital download will have before them an overwhelming array of choices to make.

While this is a boon for advanced players, and people who have experience experimenting with the system, new players will almost certainly find the power descriptions to be technical at best, occasionally incomplete, and at worst nearly incomprehensible. Tie that to the fact that you have so many choices, many of which will serve similar purposes and it’s not unreasonable to expect that the first few characters any player makes will wind up being largely experimental and possess glaring weakness in the face of the worlds villains.

Besides merely being confusing, there are some powers in the game whose balancing can only really be described as wacky. Granted this is rather par for the course for a fresh release, but still it does manage to take away from the game a little bit, especially when the first patch issued on day one made drastic, and I mean drastic changes to a number of powers.

I think all players expect change at some level, well all intelligent players anyway, but even the level headed players out there found this change to be a lot to handle all at once. In my opinion people who understand how these games work will eventually realize that all of these changes were necessary, but when you buy a game and find that you feel like you’re playing a completely different game than you have been for the first few hours it’s more than a little bit unnerving.

Another thing that I think is a little bit of a pain in the rear is the tutorial.

Now I want to be completely clear, I think that integrated tutorials, or learner levels or whatever in games are a great idea, I think they beat the manual method handily, as reading how things work is fine, but reading it while you’re experimenting with it is even better. I’m probably in the minority (the extreme minority based on the questions that one hears asked over and over in chat) that actually read everything that is said in the tutorial.

On top of that the tutorial in this game is actually fairly exciting. It’s a minor crisis event in itself, if a little bit contrived in the tasks you’re asked to complete. All in all though, I think the experience is worth having, not only for the learning aspect, but because it’s a pretty good half hour story. Two complaints however, first and foremost, I”ve made and deleted probably two dozen heroes by now, every single one of them has had to go through this tutorial.

That’s a half hour of simple tasks that aren’t in and of themselves either that difficult, or entertaining, and once you’ve gone through the crisis story once or twice you’ve probably picked out all the nuance you can from it. I know they’re currently working on a way that players who are creating new heroes who have done the tutorial before can skip it, but for now that’s a big ol’ sigh from me when I decide I want to try a slightly different power configuration. The second complaint about the tutorial, it’s not nearly complete enough. I suppose I should rephrase that, it’s complete, but some areas aren’t, at least I don’t think, well enough explained.

I managed to cobble together the majority of what was being said with some creative experimentation with the help of the tutorial text, and perhaps that’s what the developers were going for, but I am not the norm, most players are entitled, instant gratification junkies. Now I have a whole rant about that, and I would suggest that such a complex system is probably not going to be much fun for them, but in the case that they’re here and trying to play the game, perhaps some more clear and directed training would be a good thing.

That’s a very minor complaint, however.

That does quite nicely, though, bring me to the next bit of a problem that I noticed. The difficulty curve. Now there a a few thoughts on what makes the best play experience, but that’s a whole other debate. However one curve shape that has never been proven to be much fun, is that shape that looks like an ECG. Yes, the difficulty curve can charitably be described as inconsistent, and if you’re a cynic downright bizarre.

The tutorial starts out with kid gloves, which is fair enough I suppose, but once you get out things take a pretty drastic jump. While that’s easily recoverable issues arise when you begin to combat certain villain groups, suddenly you’ll find some which make you feel like you’re fighting tutorial mobs again, and then suddenly you’ll get to a certain variety of enemy who you can only whittle down through a battle of attrition, killing one at a time until finally all the ones that you need are dead.

One other minor issue I did have was with certain elements of combat. Normally the combat is fast paced and requires a certain amount of forethought and quick reaction, yet occasionally you might find yourself locked into an animation and preventing you from accomplishing what you needed. I suppose you could say that the animation times are part of the powers, but I personally would have preferred a system of blending allowing a little more freedom in power use. That’s merely a personal preference however.

And I’ve saved my biggest gripe for last. The levelling experience leaves a great deal to be desired. The individual missions themselves are for the most part quite well done, and the scenery and objectives happen to flow nicely from one to the next, but the problem lies in that there is just barely enough missions to get you to the level cap without requiring a grind. Another fairly unfortunate side effect of this happens to be a drastic reduction in replay value.

If you need to complete every available quest to get to the end game, that doesn’t leave anything new for alts or new concept characters you might want to try out. In the end it really does feel very repetitive which is very sad considering how forgiving and powerful the systems in place for power selection and costume creation are for people who would like to try something new.

To their credit the developers have stated that they are aware of the problem and are working on it, but in my opinion this is one of the things that justify letting a release date slip slightly. I suppose to sum it up, when it comes to the mission structure and levelling experience Champions does in fact feel unfinished.

I figure I’ve likely gone on about this long enough, so I’ll just sign out by saying despite the list of shortcomings above I’m still having a great deal of fun. It remains to be seen whether it’s simply a matter that Champions is something new amidst a sea of same-y generic fantasy games, or if the game can stand up on it’s own merits once the newness and uniquness of the experience wears off.