Champions Online Review pt 2 – Fine, I Bought The Fucking Thing
I was taunted by the videos showing off travel powers. Taunted I say! Since it’s only $20 to begin I decided to hell with it, may as well go in for a pound.
Made two characters thus far- Fex and Rivet. Each with wildly different senses of style, powers, and whatnot. Fex is level 9.
So. Let me start off by saying that my previous review largely still stands, in that the intro area is sort of terrible. It feels mashed together and does nothing much to actually get you into the game, at least not for me. One thing I have to go back on is the block function. Turns out you can hold shift to maintain that, as I finally noticed after seeing the tiny sh in the corner of that ability. It also works rather well, which is nice. You can also dick around more with the controls and graphics, and for me it was critical to dick with the graphics since apparently the game assumed I’m running on a six year old computer or somesuch. I may try fiddling with the controls some more, because having mouselook always on would be wunderbahr, but since the rest of the game makes a different assumption about the interface it can be a bit bothersome. I also don’t care for the way you interact with things, like picking up a big rock to throw, because you either have to hit a key or click a little onscreen button. It’d be nice if, say, double clicking would make me pick it up, then click to throw, as opposed to again having to click the little button or hit a key.
Onward. Time to eat some crow. Holy fuck is this game deeper and better than City of Heroes. I would still love to see some better initial stat control, and explanatory text, when building a character, and I still don’t really grasp all of the underlying fundamentals, but I love that they’re there. The best thing, however, is the “builds” system.
A build is, essentially, a game role and determines things like how your offense and defense work. In CoH you picked one when you made a character, and that character was always that way. In Champions you can save various builds for each of the roles, including your various accessories that buff your stats, then switch between them on the fly.
The travel powers. These are the things that got me into this mess. Why? Because they actually have some variety. Like there’s at least four ways to fly and three of them do it with unique speed and maneuvering and general feel. The other is Fire Flight, which is identical to regular flight but, well, you’re on fire, so that’s fair enough.
The power stuff is all very cool, and has surprising depth. You level up at The Powerhouse (which sadly makes it feel sort of generic, like a K-Mart) but you can buy new powers, try them out, then undo that expenditure if you don’t like it. You also aren’t stuck in one specific power path. While powers may have pre-requisites, they’re fairly easy to fill and you’re otherwise free to pluck from the tree of ass-kickery. You can also go into your powers menu (also never described or pointed out to you) to adjust effect colors and, at least for some powers, where they emit from, such as palm, fist, eyes, so on.
I’m a slave to concepts, I have to admit. Fex is a person turned demonic by the black flames he was forced to feed souls to while enslaved in some hell dimension. His abilities are all based off his flesh and spirit being saturated by the flames and the shadows they cast. So when it came time to pick a travel power I knew it had to be either something very spry and athletic or teleportation. I really enjoyed teleporting (which is awesome in this game), but acrobatics just felt like a better fit, so I went with it. I could have bought one of many different powers, but so far all he’s gained is a shield made of shadow (to replace the standard block) which can be upgraded to do some really interesting things, a new level of his basic shadow blast, and a passive power called “shadow form” which kicks in to make me hard to see and take less damage. I figure, should I play that long, his second travel power will be teleport because by then he’ll be powerful enough for it to make sense. See what I mean? I choose to run around and hop like a retard instead of the safer, cooler power because it fits. Now Rivet is a dude in power armor, inspired by Megas XLR actually, and I am so glad that I can assign him a number of abilities, because dude does he beg for an array of small attacks and the like.
Rivet has jetboots, which is sort of tough to control but goes like a bat out of hell.
The fighting and missions are fairly nice, though also pretty standard.
We’ll see how it goes. I tend to lose interest in these things fairly quickly.