Champions: The Good

So we'll start out with the stuff in the game that I think is particularly good. The typical disclaimers apply.

Powers
Champions is a skills based game. You pick your powers with a handful of very small restrictions and off you go. You can choose to be a glass cannon, a full support character, or the tankiest of tanks since CoH pre-invuln nerf, or something in between. Want to multi-class? Sure! Want to follow one narrow path? Sure! Want to be good at a variety of stuff? It's all right there for ya, tiger, and for most roles you'll have more than enough power choices to fill whatever loadout you'd like.

Do some combinations suck? Yeah. Are some combinations super-overpowered? Sure! Are most sensical builds viable? You betcha. Champions cleverly gives you a small zone named the Powerhouse where you can somewhat test out your new powers before you commit to them. Furthermore, reverting uncommitted powers is free so other than time constraints, there's no real reason to not pick precisely which powers you think work well. With recent additions to the Powerhouse, there are very few skills which you can't actively try before you buy. Think of it as your one stop shop for superpower test drives.

I think this is a really cool feature. Being able to customize your build to your chosen style of play at a very basic level can be empowering. We'll revisit this point further in future posts since as with most things, it's a double edged sword.

Humor
Champions is bursting at its virtual seams with campy goodness. There are pirates, ninjas, and zombies. There are cowboy robots. There are giant dinosaurs. There are disembodied floating brains. There are sharks with frikkin' lasers on their heads for cryin' out loud. I'm pretty sure you can't go for more than five minutes without a pun or a joke or something in the game, most of which are 80s and 90s pop culture references that I actually get!

While some people don't appreciate this kind of thing, I find it tremendously amusing. It's sort of the return of the classic Sierra humor which I've so missed. It's sort of like being in a Tick comic which, as far as I can tell, is kind of the point. The fact that it isn't a dark, brooding, seething with generic rage kind of game really makes it stand out. It's the sort of thing that I liked out of the Buffy TV series--while it had its dark and serious moments, it never really took itself too seriously. I can appreciate that.

Mechanics
Champions has three mechanics which I hadn't encountered in other games: tap, tap+hold, and block. That doesn't mean that they're specific to Champions (obviously), only that this is my first encounter with them.

A tap power is a typical clicky a la your favorite MMO. Click on the button, hit 3, and fire off some power. Maybe it has a cooldown, maybe it doesn't. A tap+hold is typically a tap power which does something cool but gets progressively better the longer you hold it. Need a short heal to make sure the tank doesn't die? Tap your healing power and heal a small amount. Want to frontload your damage? Tap+hold your biggest DD and blast the goon into smithereens. Don't think of it as "overkill", think of it as "powering them into the afterlife"! There are also maintained powers which apply a per-tick effect, but these aren't especially new.

Block deserves its own discussion so here we go. One of the things that sucked in CoH was that if you fought a big boss and you weren't a tank (or were a tank without a resistance in that damage type) you pretty much got one shotted if you drew the boss's ire. That's just how it was and it was very lame. Cryptic seems to have learned ever so slightly from those days and have added a block power to all characters. If you block as a maintained power, you can reduce the incoming damage significantly as well as avoiding some but not all status effects (holds, knockbacks, whatever). This is a pretty cool thing because if you pay attention, you can usually avoid getting turned into chunky salsa when you get aggro. In fact, the game hits you over the head with it by sticking big colorful marquee over the tops of Big Bad's head when it's about to do something big and bad to you. In fact, most of the non-trivial bads have something like this and while the lesser of these won't kill you outright most of the time, the really big and ugly bads will almost certainly kill you outright if you don't block. So pay attention! Again, we'll revisit this (extensively) in a future installment.

Nemesis
When you get to level 25, you get to design a nemesis. You pick your nemesis's looks, their powers, their minions, and fight them on a semi-regular basis. The minions will jump you while you're out heroing and will occasionally drop a clue which leads to even more hijinks.

I think this feature is a riot. It's a chance to do some interesting storytelling and give the player a hand in writing that story beyond "I killed all the badguys," or "I clicked all the glowies." It takes the antagonist and makes it somewhat personal which I think is a nice touch. Furthermore, these missions seem to be better written and more difficult than your run-of-the-mill solo missions which is a welcome change of pace.

The next logical (and not unprecedented) evolution of this is allowing the player to design nemesis encounters and share them with other people. That, I think, would be spectacular.

Encounter Design
Some of the encounter design is exceptionally well done. The first 5 person instance you get to (Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory) is full of interesting bits. You get consoles that you have to hit in sequence. You get infinitely spawning mooks. You get a set of super-campy super villain soliloquies and the final encounter is a giant robot. How can you go wrong with a giant robot?! Without going into finely grained details, I'll say that the parts that are good are really, really good.