Travel powers trailer for Champions Online

I had strongly mixed feelings going into this game. My friends and I had played CoH to death when it first came out, but got sucked away to WoW-land. I'm really the only one who ever looked back, and every time I tried to get into CoX again I just couldn't stick with it. A big part of that was the instances. Due to their modular design you could very quickly memorize where everything was. In fact, you couldn't help but do so. And spending most of your time cut off from the world just got old.

Knowing that CO is basically CoX2, I just didn't know what to expect. I think I actually anti-hyped myself. Now that I've played, I'm pleasantly surprised. What's more, a good friend who couldn't stand CoH enough to get past level 4 has been loving CO. Here are some observations of mine:

1) Travel powers are really cool. The diversity is great. Their looks are great. The fact that you get them as early as you do is a godsend. My personal favorite is teleport, which is done way better (IMHO) than in CoX.

2) The energy system is basically the reverse of CoX. There, like with most other games, you start out with a pool that depletes as you fight. The result is a system where you can run out in the middle of a fight, and often have down time in between. In CO, you are able to keep a certain amount of energy in reserve and every attack does deplete it. But you also have the energy building auto-shot and also have synergy between various powers that can generate energy. If you do it right, you will never lack for energy; even in the toughest of boss fights. Down time is also virtually nonexistent. (By the way, you recover health super fast when out of combat as well. I'll never miss that damned Rest power from CoH!)

3) The power system is definitely robust. All told, there are probably about as many individual powers as CoH shipped with. But thanks to the new mechanics you have as much flexibility as you want. Having powers that work together is a major plus as well. What's more, the fact that you can test a power out in the training area and undo your most recent power selection for free (so long as you don't leave the training area) ensures that your choices will make you happy as you go. On top of that, you can also pay a fee to remove individual powers from your build. You are never trapped with a decision that you regret later. Plus there's the fact that you can modify many of your powers -- both their main color and where they emanate from.

4) The art has really grown on me. I was not at all fond of it in the screen shots. I like it a lot now that I'm actually in the game.

5) The costume creator is both awesome and awful. Sometimes it's very confusing trying to figure out how to get a particular look. There are also some stupid things like if you are in a scroll list and select something, then want to see what other choices there are you have to start at the top of the list again. No positional memory and no left/right click arrows. Why they lost that functionality from CoH is beyond me. There are also some things I'd really like to see that are missing. (I always loved the Reaper item in CoH, for example.) There's also only one face. You can adjust sliders to reshape it, but there are no other textures to apply. Why? But all told there are way, way more choices and it is super easy to spend an hour or more creating the perfect look.

6) Crafting is just ok. Nothing special. I'm not sure how I like it compared to CoX's invention system, but that one wasn't too hot either. It really doesn't matter much to me, though, because I've never been much of a crafting. I'm a gatherer type. If you're someone who loves crafting systems, you may not be very happy.

7) The mission system is way more like WoW with super heroes than CoX. No more contacts. No more 3-mission limits. Just your classic system of mission hubs with multiple NPC's giving you stuff to do. But they also mix it up some by having lots of items and remote NPC's that give missions, along with the public missions that will be very familiar to anyone from WAR. The upshot is that the new system is much more enjoyable for me than CoX's was. There's also way less instancing. Don't let the first 8 levels fool you. Once you finish the crisis zone and enter the region proper you'll be amazed by how huge the zones are.

8) There are stupid quest designs. Bugged missions. Crashes. The typical launch blues stuff. Some quest objectives are heavily competed for, which really gets annoying when you kill the mobs in front of the objective only to have someone else slip in and take advantage of the opportunity; leaving you to wait for a respawn. It's times like these that you appreciate having no more than 100 people per instance. A welcome addition is their bug report system. You can actually search to see if what you're about to report is a known issue, and if there are workarounds.

At the end of the day, CO puts the fun back in super hero games. It IS CoX2. But it was clearly done with the intent of learning from the things that people liked most about other MMO's. Whether it will hold my interest past a few months remains to be seen. But so far, it's a very pleasant surprise for me.