I find this amusing, as I committed to a Lifetime subscription early on, it's very mediocre. I had hoped it would get better a lot faster, and thought I was getting a good deal at the time due to the potential I felt it displayed.
Otherwise I will say that there aren't many super hero liscences out there, and a lot of them are in rough shape. DC had it's own game under development, and that pretty much leaves things like what's left of "Dark Horse" or "Image" and things like "Champions" and "Mutants and Masterminds".
While accurate to the game, and some of the same thoughts I had while playing (especially in Canada, I personally thought the ever-creative "Project Greenskin" was a better zone), I will say that their lack of creativity can be given something of a pass. I mean a LOT of the Champions Universe is intentional loose equivilents to more popular comic universes since they couldn't steal their characters. If your thinking "Hey, isn't this VIPER group suspiciously similar to COBRA from GI Joe?" your pretty much getting it right, ditto for heroes and villains that are similar to other popular properties. That said "Champions" *DOES* have some original ideas and quite a few of them if you really dig through the PnP stuff, but that isn't what they are using for the most part because I think they wanted to give people "what they would expect" in hopes of garnering mainstream support.
So, in the end the game does come accross like browsing the toys at a flea market, or surplus store, where you might find "Magnificent Spider Warrior" instead of "Spider Man". "Champions Online" is sort of like someone gathered all the knock offs together and build a world using them.
That said I have been keeping an eye on DCU Online for a super-hero game fix (since I burned out on City Of Heroes/Villains long ago) but at the same time I'm pretty wary because to be honest CO looked like a better game during early development, and what I've seen of DCUO so far doesn't exactly smack of creativity. I'll be making desicians about it once I've seen a lot more of the game.
Sadly games like "Champions Online" have served to make me even more cynical.
Oh and one final note, I can't for the life of me figure out why they bothered to do an entire zone based off of Canada like that. I mean if your going to Canada, I would think they would have done something better than a generic frozen wasteland myself.
