A Call To Champions

I invite the players of League of Legends to play a little drinking game for me. Take a shot every time Phreak says “tons of damage” in his spotlight….

What’s that? Drunk already after one spotlight? Well go and sober up and come back and I’ll tell you about a REAL MMO

Say hello to Champions Online, the most amazing super hero MMO ever made. Yes I have played and taken into account City of Heroes and that bastard child of a comic book and game known as DCU Online, and Champions Online is just all around better.

Mind you no game is without its flaws, CO may be free to play, but lots of good stuff you have to pay for, I had to take a week off of the game while I waited for the points to buy the class I wanted to play, but I can’t really blame the game for PayPal’s fault. None the less, having to pay for the good stuff is a No No for games no matter how good they are. On the upside, CO features an extremely lavish character customization builder. Even if you have to buy some of the REALLY good stuff, there are still enough options to build EVERY champion in League of Legends and still have enough left over to build half of Heroes of Newearth. The possibilities are endless and limited to only your imagination; needless to say with so many unoriginal people in the world you will see superman, batman, and everyone else from every super hero cartoon ever made.

Now then onto the plot; the tutorial sets you in a city under attack by evil alien invaders, this runs you through all the controls as well as the play styles before setting you into the games massive, unrestricted, invisible wall-less environment filled to the brim with your typical story quests which can unfortunately get kinda grindy… to party made instances and even (dare I say) “dynamic events” which put un partied teams of heroes together to tangle against rioters, jailbreaks, and everything else you can think of. They’re not as dynamic as what Guild Wars 2 has in mind, mainly because there’s no since of failure if you can’t complete an objective, partially due to the fact that most of them are UNFAILABLE. They could have done much more with that but I’m still not complaining because it was a lot of fun. I found myself playing each instance many times over and it never got boring.

If I had any advice it’s the obvious ones from a gamer point of view. Make at least every class available, cause paying for everything else is actually smart. Cosmetics is the quickest (and best) way to make money with a game, but limiting our creativity defeats the lavish customization options, and also give the dynamic events a sense of realism. If we fail to stop the jailbreaks make prisoners flood the streets and terrorize the city’s inhabitants. Give us a sense that what we’re doing matters for a reason other than we get extra loot and experience points.

I give Champions Online an 8 out of 10 I can’t wait to see new heroes in the lands of
Meleenium City.