Review by: Brian Rowe

“I stood between a bikini-clad rabbit and the aptly named hero, Capt. Underpants, ready to battle Foxbat and his ping-pong gun.”

I never imagined saying a sentence like that outside of a comic convention. Champions Online is not the MMO for lumbering mead-drinkers or soft-skinned elves who frolic in forests. To live in Millennium City, you need reflexes tuned for danger, a repertoire of witty one-liners, and a seriously spiffy costume.

Molding the perfect champion is as liberating as it is daunting. Character creation hemorrhages with options, like a stadium filled to capacity with LEGOs of every size and shape. There are billions of opportunities for originality when you account for the vast arrays of affectations, sizes, and colors, and that is only from the neck up. Millennium City is the poster-child for diversity – bodybuilders in tights, robotic zombies, rainbow-colored furries, and flying businessmen mingling under the banner of justice in a brazenly vibrant world.

Fire, Ice, Munitions, Might, and Archery are some of the 18 frameworks of powers to choose from, but frameworks aren’t nearly as strict as the classes of other MMOs. You will obviously choose Fighting Claws to make a jury-rigged Wolverine, and then you can pop into Sorcery to imbue him with regenerative properties. Double-, even triple-dipping among frameworks is practically encouraged. The potential for absolute individuality feels boundless when you factor in the myriad of travel powers, like flight, tunneling, or teleportation, as well as the freedom to change the colors of powers. Nothing says “classy do-gooder” like a blizzard of yellow snow.