Played Lately: Champions Online

• It has been a while since I spent any time in Champions Online. Maybe just after the game went free to play. Thus, there has been a lot to catch up on.



• I've been spending my monthly Atari Point stipend on costume bits that catch my eye. But this month, Cryptic released the new travel power, Phoenix Flight, which is perfect for my main, Arcfire. It is just a reskin of the standard Flight power, much like my prior Fire Flight. But how can you pass up giant flaming wings?



• Once I had my powers reset, I finally checked out the most recent Adventure Pack, Resistance. This mission sees your hero traveling to Multifaria, an alternate dimension akin to DC Comics' Earth-Three. There are some neat analogues to the main Champions universe that are fun for lore nerds like myself. The mission starts off in a standard fashion, reminding me of Serpent Lantern quite a bit. But then it takes a number of twists and turns, both with the story and the gameplay that were very interesting to me. I hate to give everything away (actually, don't look at that screenshot if you want to avoid spoilers), but Cryptic makes use of temporary power swaps to change up gameplay in interesting ways. And the ending ties up some long running stories and sets up some interesting threads for future adventures. Wow, that was really vague, but only because I want you to discover it for yourself.



• Then the next day, Cryptic released the first issue of their first Comic Series, Aftershock. Interesting enough (at least to me), this mission is a follow up to Serpent Lantern. So if you haven't played that adventure pack (and you care about continuity at all), you might want to play through Serpent Lantern first. The mission is very fast, starting with a quick investigation, followed by hunting down some bad guys.



• The highlight of the mission is the defending a base that you just cleared from waves of VIPER soldiers. There are various turret defenses that you can startup and control directly if you want. At higher difficulty levels, that may be required, but I let them fire automatically while I flew from squad to squad, taking the baddies out. The final fight against Ripper was very straight forward and the mission finished with a cut scene setting up the next issue. It was fun, if very fast, and I'm looking forward to this coming Wednesday. See you all in Millennium City!

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