Champions Online

Of these, Millennium City is the mid-level centrepiece and by far the best and most original. While the others tumble into MMORPG tropes - poisoned wildernesses, unruly wildlife, rebel outposts - Millennium City is a proper, and quite spectacular, superhero's playground. There are dozens of satisfyingly-spun little tales in its mission arcs, there's an abundance of entertaining micro-dungeons for one player or small groups, and the urban geography is a breath of fresh air.

The overlapping pairs of the other zones (Canadian and New Mexican wastelands in the game's first half, the more colourful Monster Island and undersea Lemuria in the second) are extensive, but thematically quite dull, and over the game as a whole there just isn't enough variety. The silver lining is that Cryptic's decision to eschew servers and allow you to hop between instances of these maps at will can't really spoil the immersion of such a restricted and crudely divided world, so the positives - easy grouping with friends, or indeed anyone - far outweigh the negatives.

As for what's on those maps, it's mostly good news. They're thickly populated with enjoyably silly enemies with erratic, but not completely trivial AI. The missions are well-paced and sequenced for variety, and though they hardly defy MMO convention, they don't lean too heavily on it either. And they come thick and fast.

The trouble is, they go thick and fast too. MMO players may claim to hate quests that promote grind, but they hate grind without quests to support it even more, and Champions' short sharp missions, even in their multitudes, just don't generate enough XP. Opinions vary on whether there are any true "levelling gaps", but things are certainly stretched very thin at a couple of points in the mid-to-late levels. And what's even more certain is that there are only enough missions to support a single play-through, meaning if you want to create a new hero - surely one of the principal attractions of this game - you'll be doing absolutely all of it again.

There are a few other diversions. There are more substantial dungeons, or Lairs, for five players - but they only arrive in the second half. Given Champions' free character design, these can't really offer the same tight co-operative interplay as other MMOs dungeons. But they're terrific fun to smash through all the same, and Cryptic has thoughtfully included the option to switch any character between three builds that will skew its stats for offensive, defensive, support or all-round roles, making balanced grouping more plausible.

Ditto the mouth-watering chance to create your Nemesis. This is a custom-designed boss whose henchmen will occasionally and randomly mob you (this makes you feel special, but can be annoying), and whose missions provide some of the best fun later in the game, as well as some endgame rewards. The Nemesis could be Champions' most appealing and unique feature; if I keep playing, it will be because I want settle some scores with Bad Chicken.

There are the open missions, based on Warhammer Online's public quests: multiplayer staged missions that anyone can take part in. Many of these don't work properly at the moment, and the rewards aren't clear enough, so they're having a similarly hard time reaching critical mass even on Champions' large and busy maps. The random fracas of the player-versus-player Hero Games is fun but under-developed, and will probably struggle to sustain the focus on it as a source of endgame loot; ditto the repeatable, high-level UNITY missions. Most Champions players will probably gravitate towards collection and completism, the game's Perks (read achievements) and Action Figures (read vanity pets) being an appropriately nerdy, box-checking time-sink.

In terms of quality if not quantity, the game's content is a good effort, and it will be fleshed out. In a year's time, Champions Online has every chance of being one of the better MMOs out there, and superseding its estranged elder brother City of Heroes. Cryptic has proven its ability to make that happen, so all it needs are the resources and the paying audience.