Champions Online

Experimenting on your first play-through is a daunting trip into the unknown. Balance is, unsurprisingly, far from a given, some combinations aren't all that workable, and while you can strip back any decision and redo it, this is pretty expensive. This has caused a lot of anguish among players, particularly those who got used to a bit more flexibility for less cost in the beta testing phase. But it goes with the sandbox territory, is a bearable price to pay for all that delicious freedom, and in any case will probably be refined by Cryptic in good time.

All the same, the choices are hard, and they don't come often enough. You get your show-stopping and staggeringly useful travel power - flight, superspeed, acrobatics, the wonderful Spider-Man-style swinging, the clever implementation of teleportation and more - at a mere level five, after completing a short, dense tutorial tour (an alien invasion scenario that rockets you efficiently through questing, an "open mission" and a boss fight). After that, you get just one new power every three levels.

It's like being served a huge slice of chocolate pudding for a starter and then finding out the main course consists of one spoonful of thin soup every half an hour. With Champions' dynamic combat system - which has an (only slightly illusory) action-game feel - and ambitions for a console release, you can understand Cryptic wanting to avoid smothering your screen in buttons. But unless you have a particularly single-minded design in mind, it simply takes too long to build up a rounded suite of basic powers for basic situations, never mind acquiring something a little special. And the effect on the already rather lightweight combat isn't altogether complementary.

Fighting in Champions is a matter of building up energy with an auto-attack, and then expending it on powers, most of which you hold down a button to charge, and then release. You can also block in anticipation of enemies' super-attacks, which are telegraphed with neat comic graphics. It's a rowdy sort of scrap, fun in small doses and a little twitchier than the dry clicking of most MMOs, but with far less to interest you in the long run.

What's more, the fact that all powers are either automatic or charge-and-release robs combat of some the tactile impact you'd expect of an action RPG. Combine that with the small number of slowly acquired powers, some of which might become redundant later in the game, and it gets old, fast. It's also a strange choice that the death penalty - and death, unless you stumble across a perfect build by accident, will be frequent - is loss of a "star rating", reducing your effectiveness in combat, and therefore making you more likely to die again.

It's possible, albeit difficult, to suck a little more long-term sustenance from Champions' RPG system. Based on the well-regarded tabletop role-playing game, this is a bizarre and not very intuitive table of strange stats (I challenge you to guess the properties of Ego and Presence sight unseen). Finding the right combinations for your character build is confusing and poorly explained at first, absorbing later on. You can spend points on these every few levels, as well as improving them through your nine equipment slots.

Speaking of which, loot is a problem. You don't see it, it's conceptually very weird, and you get a confusing array of incremental upgrades all the time through missions while substantial upgrades that make a discernible difference to your power are rare as hen's teeth. Items that have a special use - effectively an additional skill, often with a cool visual effect - are choice, naturally, but often mean sacrificing stats. As you approach maximum level, and face grinding repeatable missions or player-versus-player arenas day after day just for points that one day might get you one item, the sense of diminishing returns becomes acute. Crafting is a decent and quite diverting route to decent gear later in the game, but early on, it's only any good for one-shot novelties and utilities.

Does an MMO necessarily have to be an ocean-deep well of character progression to justify its subscription, though? That's a matter of taste, and there are surely players out there who want to enjoy persistent worlds in smaller doses, with less commitment and less tinkering. Champions' rough-and-ready combat certainly suits that style. All it needs to satisfy these players is fun and varied content to play, and enough of it.

Cryptic's hit-rate in this area is decidedly mixed. After the tutorial, you're chased off into one of two similar, restricted "crisis zones", which later open out into full-bodied and absolutely vast maps. But - and it's a very big but - there are only five of these in the whole game.