Champions Online Review

Installed and played for a few hours tonight. I am playing on a Dell inspiron 1520 w/nvidia 8600gt. I can play on high @ 1024x768, no aa, no af. HDR enabled.

Positives...
Character Creation (loads of choices)
Simple directives
Colors and Animation are nice

Negatives
Simple Directives
Repetitive (so far)
Level 4 and no power ups yet...

Can't wait until tomorrow.. be playing it on a Alienware m17 on xfire...

SXO792

 

You should get the Power Ups once you leave for the second training zone around level 6.

CO is fun and definitely unique because of the extensive character creator utility. The mmo has it's share of bugs and needs some major improvements (mainly with chat and certain powers) but overall is one of the smoothest launches in recent memory. I am definitely looking forward to Star Trek Online now since beta access is included with my CO 6 month pre-order subscription.

 

Awesome review.

 

Ok.. more on Champions.. I noticed that two things are essential to me for playing... One is HDR Lighting and two is shadows. Another option on advanced lets you outline everything to give the game a very comic book feel. The above settings are necessary to me... I think shadows on high is a must. When I look at comics, I look at the shading and shadows... I am playing on my m17 now and it looks great. Game is not optimized for crossfire yet but should be soon.. love it so far... Best Wishes,

Stevenx

 

This isn't a review . You're just talking about the visuals and the performance on your laptop. -_-

 

The OP listed his/her thoughts on Pros & Cons and further states that he/she 'loves it so far'. That's good enough to be a review in my book.

 

Coming from you it's not really surprising.

 

What's that suppose to mean, Akuma? There's no need to be an .

 

I wish CoH would be free after CO comes out. Theyre basically the same game. I can only hope...

 

LOL Akuma funny thread

 

This look like a great game i will probably pick it up by year end.

 

I played City of Heroes for quite some time. Still do from time to time..always a great game.

This is the same company that made CoH if I'm not mistaken. Before another company bought the rights to it.

I am defiantly looking forward to playing this game.

 

To summarize,
1.If you have an entry level notebook with a dedicated card than you can play the game. If you have an integrated card then you may not be able to run it or run it at low settings.
2. The graphics are great! Very comic like. If possible, enable shadows and comic outlines as it really adds to the game. (I would choose these over AA and AF)
3. The play is repetitious but I am just getting started at level 9 so I am sure it will get better. (servers went down for a while last night)
4. No Xfire or Sli optimization at this point
5. Character creation is outstanding!

Hope this helps,

StevenX

 

I don't think CO will benefit much from Crossfire/SLI. It plays great as is on my laptop just as well as my gaming desktop (HD4890), albeit @ medium/high settings.

Not sure about SLI but I have yet to see a supported game that offers better improvement with Crossfire enabled.

 

Champions online is COH on crack.
Seriously:

The tailor makes it really easy to change characters daily. You can look like anything you want. Save the previous look and go back to it. You could cycle looks 7 days a week and go right back to the original if you wanted for a resource fee that is generally easy enough to gain.

The pvp is interesting. I have only done this up to level 10 but I can tell you that picking powers for pvp seems like the real focus to me. The pve is alright so far. I haven't found anything that screamed awesome to me yet about the pve. The pvp is actually a lot of fun and you can level up pvping over and over again. This is kind of like warhammer's system. You can queue up almost anywhere and just jump into pvp right away.

Cell shading graphics are interesting but different. The first day I played I hated the ui. It's growing on me.

Most everyone rarely talks. You would think the footage of bioware talking about talking mmo's would make everyone start drinking games on every time some bioware rep says Fully voiced mmo. TAKE A DRINK! Champions doesn't seem to have any of this so far. There are cutscenes where people talk and I have had 1 enemy say something but in this area It seems kind of lacking.

Instances are really big. I think people will be happy with the sizes. The instancing might be troublesome but it will keep things running well.

Powers seem varied well enough. I created an Ironman look alike that really approximates the movie version. I need arm mounted rockets but otherwise its very similar.

I think the loading screens need more variety and to cycle better. I'm tired of the gorilla already.

I think people will generally enjoy this mmo for a bit. I wonder what will draw them in for the long run. Not really sure yet. Travel powers at level 5 is a huge plus.

Hope this tells people about the game. I'm on the fence on recommending this to everyone. SuperHero Fans will enjoy it.

You don't need to pick it up. You can grab it on Steam.

 

i like how they were trying to push a £200 lifetime subscription