Review: Man of Steel

It's fitting that, like its protagonist, Man of Steel is from two worlds.  In one way, it succeeds with flying colors (HAH! Get it?) as a superhero movie.  In another way, it fails to be decent as a film.

Coming from Christopher Nolan's Batman co-writer, David S. Goyer, and 300 director Zack Snyder, Man of Steel earns a place in the new school of superhero movies by making the hero's backstory more cohesive and elegant while packing the film with tons of stylish CGI fighting.  You can see Nolan's influence both in the effort to bring something this fantastical down-to-earth (by abandoning or reworking all of the goofiest aspects of Superman) and in all the thoughtful staring into space the characters do.

Yep.

As an action fan, my jaw was literally sitting slack for about ten minutes straight during Superman's first big fight sequence.  Seriously, I think a few flies wandered into my mouth.  This is the best Superman movie ever, if only because Snyder so perfectly nailed Superman's fighting on film.  Previous movies were hamstrung by the special effects of their time and perhaps the imaginations of their filmmakers.  Before, Superman would lift something heavy very slowly and we were all supposed to be impressed.  Man of Steel thinks nothing of punching characters through entire city blocks of buildings.  At one point Superman brushes a truck off his shoulder because it's getting in the way of him punching someone through a wall.  It's the real deal, and if you're as much a fan of punching as I am, you'll love it.

Just another ho-hum Tuesday in Metropolis

One of the keys to making the new generation of superhero movies work for the general public has been to modify their worlds and lore so they seem as close to believable as possible.  Man of Steel does the best job of this I could have imagined for this character (with one small exception).  It takes pains to make Krypton a real place, and brings a villain who arises naturally from the events of Kal-El's origin, rather than feeling random or contrived - or cartoonishly villainous like film depictions of Lex Luther have been.  Kryptonite isn't a glowing green rock, and Lois Lane, the Pulitzer-winning reporter, isn't going to be fooled by a pair of glasses.  In classic Nolan fashion, the villain and the core conflict of the film are linked to the core themes of the film and the main character's own challenges, instead of seeming randomly plugged-in just to fill the pre-requisite villain slot.

Holy shit look at this guy.  They don't even need to pad the fucking suit.

Man of Steel also stands out in the casting department.  Henry Cavill is Superman, and I hope he gets to keep playing that character for at least another decade.  He plays a calm, controlled version of the character who just emanates kindness and trustworthiness, but also shows flashes of emotional release and humanity - whether it be joy at discovering he can fly, or righteous fury at threats to his loved ones.  Amy Adams fits into the role of Lois Lane so naturally that I forgot she was an actress, and Michael Shannon's Zod lends the character so many qualities that enrich him, even as the script tries to shove him into the land of hamminess.  All of Superman's many parents act the shit out of their scenes, and give performances that elevate the entire film.  Laurence Fishburne is mostly wasted as Perry White, but when he gets one chance to act, he grabs it by the throat.

Unfortunately, the pitch-perfect reimagining of Superman and the jaw-dropping battle sequences can't save Man of Steel from being more than just stylish spectacle.  The plot is fucking perforated - there are innumerable holes and so many belief-stretching coincidences that they stick out even in a movie about a flying alien who punches spaceships.  The character development is shoddy, and somehow fails to really flesh Superman out as a character even though it spends the entire first half of the movie just following him around while he broods.  The motivations and decisions made by almost all characters throughout the movie are inconsistent.  The villains plan is pretty terrible, which is surprising considering that the movie makes a huge point out of how he was bred and raised to be great at military shit.  Did they just not teach strategy and tactics in Kryptonian West Point?  He's a fucking general, for god's sake!

ZHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!

You can see Goyer and Nolan make gestures towards thematic resonance, but they are nowhere near as successful in Man of Steel as they were in The Dark Knight.  The plot wasn't set up well enough to give Superman the kind of agency he'd need to make his choices matter, and the constant plot problems undermine the message every step of the way.  It definitely feels like whatever was thought-provoking about the original script had to be twisted or cut out to make way for more CGI punching and product-placements (OK, we get it, you want us to notice SEARS and IHOP.  Thanks, Warner Brothers Pictures).  On the other hand, given all the brick-over-the-head obvious christ references, maybe Goyer and Snyder are just hacks.  Further evidence for that case: the amount of property damage and human death Superman directly causes or allows to happen.  It creates a dissonance that disrupts the whole movie.  For the final half hour, all I could think was "Superman would get this fight away from civilians" and "Bruce Wayne is going to be SO MAD at you, Clark!" *

And to top it all off, like all blockbusters, it gives the ladies short shrift.  Lois is actually done pretty well early on, but as the movie progresses she devolves into combination damsel/lovestruck puppy instead of the brave, plucky reporter of the first half.  Martha Kent and Mrs. El are both barely in their scenes, making way for Kal/Clark's two fathers to take center stage, and pretty much all the credit.  Even the villain's second-in command, a badass lady soldier, finds a nemesis in a run-of-the-mill human.  Zod's nemesis is Superman, her nemesis is some random soldier with no superpowers, unless you count a previously starring in Law and Order: SVU as a superpower.  That gives you an idea of what the people who made this movie think of women: a woman with godlike superpowers is roughly equivalent to a normal man with a knife.

Roughly equivalent.

Despite the writer's daddy issues and the plotting failures, I think Man of Steel is worth seeing in the theater.  It's definitely the best summer tent pole blockbuster I've seen since The Avengers, and creates an excellent foundation for the new DC film universe (I'm assuming Nolan's Batman won't be the one we see in the Justice League movies).  It's a treat for the senses and the fight scenes knock it out of the park.  Just don't think too much while you watch it, and definitely don't go in expecting The Dark Knight with laser eyes.



*I think the obvious step for the sequel is for the world to be mad at Superman for all of the damage he and his brethren caused.  It makes a great motivation for a complex version of Lex Luthor: he's not evil, he just wants to get rid of Superman before he and his alien friends destroy the planet.  Make him a humanist who would never do anything to hurt other people and is working toward building a legitimate utopia, but becomes sidetracked trying to get Superman to go away and get Earth out of the line of fire.

Starcraft 2 Single-Player Impressions

Short version: Blizzard continues to release games when they are ready. 

Long version: OK, I'm not the most impartial reviewer here.  I was predisposed to absolutely love this game after how much fun I had with both the single- and multi-player parts of the original Starcraft, as well as every installment of the Warcraft RTS games.  And guess what?  I absolutely love it.  I love it so much that I wish I could italicize that last sentence twice.

More after the jump.

APB Review

If you are an MMO gamer, don't be fooled by the persistence of the world in Realtime World's new online GTA-clone All Points Bulletin (APB).  It's not for you.  I'd argue that it's not even an MMO.  It's a shooter with driving and great customization options that just so happens to take place in a single persistent world instead of the usual structure of separate servers for each match.

The core gameplay consists of receiving a mission that gives you an objective and some opponents and sets you loose in the city.  Each mission is more like a miniature Warsong Gulch match than a warcraft-style "quest" - though sometimes you will be Fed Ex-ing an item from one place to another - sometimes in an actual delivery truck, even.  Nonetheless, such quest-like mechanics end up bearing more resemblance to capture-the-flag than deliver-the-parcel.

If you can accept the analogy: APB is like Halo or Call of Duty if you got to hang out in the map between matches instead of going to a "find a match" menu.  Except it plays exactly like Grand Theft Auto, with very basic first-person shooting and challenging and sometimes wonky driving.

The Lost Finale

If you haven't watched the Lost series finale that aired yesterday, stop reading now.

After the jump is spoilerland.

Book Review: The Steel Remains

What can you do to spice up a genre as well-traveled as swords-and-sorcery "hard" fantasy? A genre that is perhaps more locked into tradition and disconnected from reality than any other?

In the case of Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains: you take a critical eye to it, and you root it back into reality. You wipe off the gilding until you find the dirty, flawed humanity underneath. Instead of writing a shiny, clean bit of wishful thinking that happens to come equipped with swords, dragons, and beautiful damsels, you instead write a noir story that just so happens to be set in a world of magic and dragons. Oh, and torturing Inquisitors and wolf-shaped demigods who will mangle your genitals.

This is Morgan's first foray into fantasy, after making a name for himself with award-winning and best-selling sci-fi noir stories and thrillers such as Altered Carbon and Thirteen. He has always had a knack for grounding his books in reality even as he tackles such fantastical topics as gene manipulation, mind-swapping, and space travel. The worlds he creates feel genuine, and the inhabitants are realistically flawed and react to these crazy technologies in believable ways. Morgan's visions of the future are so authentic that they don't just seem possible: they seem likely.

In The Steel Remains, Morgan brings these skills fully to bear on the fantasy genre.

The narrative bounces amongst three protagonists: the disenfranchised and cynical war hero Ringil, the gruff viking tribe leader Egar, and Archeth, a woman half-bred with a long-lost race of engineers whose works border on magic. Ringil's story treads familiar noir territory: a woman finds him living a low life and tasks him with searching for someone in trouble, which leads him into a larger mess than he bargained for. Meanwhile, Archeth faces a military mystery of her own while wrangling with the corrupt government, and Egar encounters betrayal and demigods.

Their stories intertwine while introducing the reader to the three main allied factions in their world. Years after a war that united humanity against the invading "scaled folk" that emerged from the sea, we see an aftermath where imperfect leaders and institutions (like those we'd expect in the real world) have led to imperfect conditions. Conflicts are made, politics and petty bickering must be observed, and the people of this world suffer for it. After border disputes and brutal slaughtering of rebels, an uneasy alliance has been reached amongst the Emperor, a king, and the northern tribes. It is in this setting that Morgan explores human nature and the flaws of our institutions and leaders.

No review of this book could be complete without addressing Morgan's head-on treatment of homosexuality. Two of the primary characters are gay, and the reader is faced with an odd juxtaposition: Morgan treats homosexual sex and desire as just as normal and open as most authors treat the hetero versions (there are a few very explicit scenes), yet those characters are shunned within the book's world for their preference. Their version of the church even goes so far as to design a special torture for those "convicted" of sodomy: they are locked in a paralyzing cage and put on dispay in the public square as a massive spiked pole is slowly screwed into them from below until it emerges from their shoulder. There they hang for days, impaled and in agony (and with jeering children throwing rocks at them) until they finally die.

Yeah, it's a dark book.

Morgan's previous books could easily be described as "page-turners", but if there is any problem with The Steel Remains, it is that the story sometimes feels meandering. It can be hard to discern where the plot is going, so the reader may feel less driven to keep following the story. The plot plays fast and loose with the usual 3-act story conventions. It can be great to spurn tradition, but this book seems afloat without the usual guideposts. Morgan also seems more interested in world-building than character-building, with everything else sometimes feeling like an afterthought in comparison to descriptions of the book's setting. The story could probably use a minor restructuring, but it is still a great book in spite of this.

The Steel Remains will not allow you to escape to a simpler world where heroes are heroes and blah blah blah. But it will entertain, intrigue, and impress you. You'll probably be challenged to look at a few things a different way, and in my opinion that's the best thing any book can strive for.

WoW Radio Closing Its Doors . . . Sort Of.

My favorite podcast provider announced a few days ago that it will be closing down. WCRadio.com, affectionately known as WoW Radio, has been around for 6 years, providing a centralized, united source of WoW media, flagshipped by their fleet (wait, that metaphor made no sense...) of weekly WoW podcasts, and accentuated by events like their exhaustive Blizzcon coverage and WoW Idol, a showcase of WoW-themed music created by fans*

But thankfully, WoW Radio won't really be gone. Each of its nearly a dozen podcasts will be continuing on their own, and the wcradio.com site will become a hub to help us keep track of where they've gone. Though my favorite podcasts will continue, and perhaps even be improved now that the overhead of running the entire organization is gone, I can't help but feel, with a twinge of sadness, that this is the end of an era.

So long and thank you, WoW Radio.

If you, dear reader, are not listening to WoW Radio, here's what you should be downloading right now:


Blue Plz!

Winner of Larisa's "Best Podcast" award for 2009, and my favorite podcast ever, Blue Plz! is not to be missed. Snarky solo host Totalbiscuit brings his homebrewed combo of British wit and belligerence to bear on the most controversial WoW topics of the day . . . and if there isn't a topic of the day, he'll make up some controversy on the spot! He's intelligent, opinionated, and always entertaining, and he's not letting the over-entitled get away with anything.

Except . . . TB . . . please stop it with the "singing".


Casually Hardcore

Much more generally inviting, but only slightly less entertaining, is Casually Hardcore. It's hosted by a team of older gamers (in their 30s) who talk about trying to fit WoW gaming into their busy lives around their children ("Nemesis" can often be heard interrupting the show to ask his parents for a juice box), jobs, and other hobbies, but it's by no means dry. Hosts Gnomewise, Iolite, Gwenora, Daksa, and Grail (a nice mix of 3 men and 2 women) imbue the show with constant levity and humor, and most of the meat of the show is about relaying and digesting WoW news to help the casual player keep up with what is going on and actually make sense of it. They definitely showcase what it means to be "casual" without any of the negative connotations that word sometimes gets.


Octale & Hordak vs. The World

You are the world, and they are versus you! Often imitated, never duplicated, and sometimes eviscerated, hosts Octale and Hordak - along with their 3rd wheel Doc Dead - are smart guys with a great sense of humor. Though the show rarely discusses WoW anymore, instead focusing on other developments in the wider world of gaming, it's non-stop entertainment. Their use of "drop-ins" (a common radio trick of using audio clips they can play at the push of a button) is especially enjoyable.


the rest

The three I've already listed are at the top of my weekly podcast listening list, but that doesn't mean that the rest of WoW Radio's offerings are any worse. For more Totalbiscuit, listen to his general gaming show called "Gaming the System". Natural20 provides great guides to WoW class mechanics in "Just Plain Better", which I'd highly recommend to anyone who wants to better understand their class. General gaming show "Maxspeed" is also entertaining (if a little bit more on the juvenile side) and "But Wait, There's Lore" is great for people who care about - you guessed it - lore.


So if you are interested enough in WoW to be reading this blog, I highly recommend you check out the shows on WoW Radio, and follow them as they go their separate ways. It is a sad day to see an institution in the community go, but I can't be too sad when the podcasts are still going to be there.

And finally, I want to offer a heartfelt "thank you" to WoW Radio for all of the hours of entertainment you've provided for me. Keep it up.


*Check out Brewguy, especially "The Ganker", and Fatty, especially "Nerdcore".

Quick Notes on Dragon Age

I'm enjoying Dragon Age: Origins. I'm about 20 hours in, and it's felt like 5. I usually don't go in for the straight-up, Song of Ice and Fire hardcore fantasy stuff (except for Tolkien), but the setting has really hooked me, and the gameplay is the best PRG mix I've seen in a while. There is a TON of dialogue and text, which is usually pretty high quality. If I have one complaint, it's that sometimes I'm stuck in the 10th long dialogue tree in a row and I haven't fought anything for an hour, and my sword arm starts getting real itchy.

The dark, gritty, realistic nature of the world is what really hooks me. I shy away from swords and sorcery in general because I expect it to be trite, stereotypical, and unoriginal Mary Sue fantasies for insecure boys (sorry, fantasy fans!). But the story, setting, and characters in Dragon Age are complex and live in shades of grey, rather than black and white (making the players title of "Grey Warden" especially fitting). Unlike, say AoC, where "mature" means "boobies and blood", Dragon Age is the most actually mature game I've ever played. You will make hard fucking choices in this game. Almost every quest leaves you to decide who lives or dies - with no obvious, easy answer. There are overarching villains and heroes, but you'll find that though the individual story areas almost always have apparent "good guys" and "bad guys", neither of them are quite what they seem. It will always turn out that the good guy did something horrible, and the bad guy is actually just misunderstood, or something like that. The game is all about choices, and almost none of those choices will be easy.

Not that there isn't plenty of blood. Comically so if you leave "persistent blood spatter" on in the options menu, which causes the blood shed during a battle to remain on character models during the following scene. It's hard not to laugh as the characters carry on a normal conversation, apparently unbothered by the spatters of blood ALL OVER THEM. I had to turn the option off to take the game seriously when, after the first battle in the game (which, in a nice piece of self-awareness, actually has you kill exactly ten rats) all of the characters were literally soaked from head to toe in rat blood and I couldn't suppress my giggles as they continued normally as though they, you know, weren't soaked in blood.

And the game is mature in so many ways, but it still just can't hide the fact that it was made by a bunch of young men for an intended audience of young men. It's just as obsessed with boobies as AoC. Demons are, of course, always depicted as naked women, and the worst of it is that one of the main storyline characters wears a "top" that's really just a loose scarf draped over her nipples. I have never seen so much side-boob in a game in my life. Don't get me wrong, I love to look at boobies. But it really takes me out of the setting when a guy runs into battle fully clothed alongside women with nothing but tassled pasties over their nipples and vajayjay. Boobies are the greatest destroyer of suspension of disbelief known to man, and in an immersive game like this, going so overboard with the adolescent, immature sexual imagery is a major misstep. Thanks, BioWare. Real "mature".


As an aside: I normally love Final Fantasy games, but I hated the most recent installment. The combat system and economy just felt so grindy and boring that I gave up halfway through. Though the tactics system in that game seemed like a great idea in a series where most fights consisted of you tapping through the "normal attack" option as quickly as you could. You set up a series of if>then statements for each party member that lets you automate them in combat.

Dragon Age copies that system almost wholesale, but for some reason I actually like it here. Maybe it's because I'm playing on a PC and I expect a deeper RPG experience here while I expect Final Fantasy to be a superficial game tacked on to an incredibly high-production-value story. Maybe it has something to do with being able to zoom out to tactical overhead view, or maybe it's because the abilities you character have are more interesting and varied. I really can't put my finger on it for sure yet.

The only other nitpick I have with the game is actually part of its greatest strength. The Dragon Age developers did an incredible job of creating the illusion, especially through dialogue, that every single response you make in a dialogue tree matters, and you actions can lead to different outcomes. And to a large extent, this was true. But there were a few fights where I died and had to reload, forcing me to rerun the same pre-fight dialogue tree again. And the illusion shattered as I tried different options and found that, though they slightly modified a line or two of the NPC's response dialogue, in the end I was being siphoned inexorably down one or two possible paths for the conversation. It shattered the illusion.

But that's like condemning the developers for not being able to perform a miracle. In the end, I'm loving the game, and expect that once my Human Noble Berserker runs through the game as a neutral pragmatist, I'm going to enjoy re-running the game as my Dwarven Peasant Rogue with a Heart of Gold and my Totally Cold-Hearted Bitch Elven Mage. Dragon Age is a triumph because choices matter enough that changing the way you act can breath new excitement into the game, and it's married to an RPG system interesting enough that I want to try all 3 classes.

Champions Online Beta Review: Should You Buy It?

Let me get this out of the way first:

I love Champions Online.

So now my job is no longer to tell you whether or not I like the game. My job is to tell you why I like it, and what it is about me that makes me the type of person who would love this game. Then you can compare yourself to me, and see if you might love it too.

Another thing to get out of the way first: I've spent a lot of time playing the game, but I have not proceeded past Millenium City, which is the level 12-20ish zone. I can't tell you anything first hand about the endgame or even the later leveling zones, the Nemesis system, or how heroes play once they've built up a lot of powers. Instead, between the closed and open beta, I rerolled a dozen different characters over the past few months, trying different powersets and both early zones, getting a strong feel for the character creator and the early levels.

What CO gets right:

Aesthetics: Sure, not everyone is going to love the the cel-shaded graphics with the thick black outlines, but there is an easily-located check-box in the video options that turns all that off. Then it just looks like a next-gen CoH. Not the visual revelation Aion is, but a leap ahead of WoW, and still pleasantly stylized.

But the real victory of the visuals is in the animations, the costumes, and the power effects. I can't tell you what you will think of them, but I can tell you to me, as a long-time comic-book and video game fan, they just feel right. The animations are dynamic, varied, and exciting. You really get the feel of being a powerful superhero. Superpowered punches distort the air around them with visible impact, while a sword-wielding ninja spins and flips while cutting down her enemies, and a sorcerer deployes magical circles and runes across the landscape to assist the gadgeteer's mechanical gun turret. The travel powers are really standout here, especially the spot-on rocket boots, ice-surfing, and fire flight. The costume options not only dwarf even CoX, but they show appropriate variety and even a sense of humor. You can make a hero with a cartoonish nuclear rocket strapped to his back and a "1/2" emblazoned on his chest, with tentacles for a mouth, furred cybernetic hands, mandibles emerging from his waist and boots that would be more at home in Gundam than Gotham.

The powers look good, and get bigger and flashier the more you level them up and acquire complementary powers. For instance, at level 1 your psi-blade looks a bit small and weak. Rank it up and it gets big and fiery. Pick up Ego Form and suddenly you're dual-wielding big, pulsing id- blades in a flurry of destruction.

And that's not even mentioning "power replacers" that you can pick up throughout the game to selectively modify your powers visually. The clearest example is one that changes the look of your hero's sword.

I'm someone who cares about aesthetics. Unlike a lot of other bloggers, I care what my mount or vanity pet or armor looks like, and what my character's animations are. One of the deciding factors originally for me to pick WoW over EQ was the more appealing (to me) visual style. If you are like me, and care a lot about how a game looks and feels, you won't be disappointed with CO.

Customizability: Not a lot can be said here that hasn't already been said. Character creation puts other games to shame. Powers can be recolored and have different emanation points. Powers, including weapons, can be visually replaced. The power system lets you pick and choose from any powerset at any time, with a loose tier system being the only thing keeping you from going completely nuts. There are tons of different powers to choose from. You can use any name you want, even if someone else already thought of it. You can even heavily customize the controls (even choosing between gamepad and mouse/keyboard!) and the graphics quite heavily.

Accessibility: You'd think, with all these options, the game would be hard to get into. It's not. There's all kinds of optional presets when creating a hero to help you jump in quickly, while still giving you access to the full power of the system. If you don't care to delve too far into the creator, you can be ready in a minute or two. The power set structures are easy to understand, and there to guide you, while still offering the "custom" option for advanced players who want to delve further. The game plays like others you are familiar with. It has the most lenient death penalty I have ever seen in any game. It marks your quest objectives on the map, simplifies your inventory, keeps your gear decisions limited and relatively simple, and slowly ramps up your powers and abilities. Yes, there are some partially-obscured game mechanics, but it comes nowhere close to most other MMOs, where you have to keep a guide open in another window just to figure out what your stats mean or where to go next. You get your travel power right after the tutorial and early leveling moves at a brisk pace.

CO is going to be very good for whatever chunk of time you have available, whether that be 20 minutes while the baby naps or 4 hours on a sunday afternoon alone. It's easy to pick up and play.



The thing that brings all these positives together into one package is a trick stolen from Blizzard (no surprise, given that one of the head designers is one of the early Blizzard guys): combining the best elements from other games. You're going to level up through a series of quests you get from people with yellow exclamation points over their heads. You're going to encounter WAR elements like public quests and having quest objectives labeled on your map. You're going to see statistics, and gear, and instanced group missions. In short, you are getting every feature you'd expect from a modern MMO. So really, the only questions you have to ask yourself are:

1) Do I like the way the game looks and feels?

2) Is the combat and character advancement system deep enough for me? Do I want something this accessible, or will I get bored when I'm not balancing 5 stats with my 40-talent-point build while skilling up my wand skill and juggling 15 pieces of gear?

3) Can I enjoy a "care bear" game with no world PvP or major consequences for death?




What CO gets wrong:

• The powers system is mostly good, but it builds far too slowly. You spend the first 45 minutes or so with only 2 abilities, and then only 3 for another half-hour. At level 12 you still only have 4-5 combat abilities. In most MMOs, you'll have that many by level 4.
• Lack of innovation in questing: this is a WoW-alike.
  
• Controls are a little wonky, especially targeting. I often find myself accidentally mistargeting, and having to retrain myself for the fact that I have to either use an attack or hit tab, but if I do both I won't be on my desired target. It's also a hassle to ensure that your auto-attack stays active when you want it to. Interacting with objects requires a keypress (though sometimes I can right-click a quest giver, but I can't figure out why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't), and if you are close to multiple interactive objects, you'll get a hard-to-navigate list of them to choose from. I can't count the number of times I meant to pick up a quest item and accidentally hefted a nearby truck instead. I think this will improve as I adjust, but it feels more detached and less responsive than, say, WoW.
• Super Stats are poorly explained. They are actually very interesting, because the two super stats you select become the only stats that raise your damage. Essentially, you have complete freedom to choose which stats you want to chase, rather than, for instance, being a WoW warrior who has to gather strength and ignore intellect.
  
• The stats system has another flaw: powers often scale with specific stats, and it's easy to put yourself in a situation where you favor, say, ego and strength, and find that one of your powers scales off of endurance, and thus will always be gimp.
• PvE Balance: In closed beta, I would get decimated by groups with even two enemies in them. Every fight was a dangerous struggle, seemingly no matter what power combination I picked. Defensive powers helped, but the game didn't do enough to encourage me to pick them up even though I'd consider then almost mandatory (hint: the first power you get upon leaving the tutorial should be a defensive passive!). But even with them, the game was on the hard side. This is completely changed in open beta. I have to ass-pull three packs to even be in danger of dying, and have just mowed through even group quests as long as I have a defensive power active. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.
  

So far, replay value is mixed. The downside is that there is only one tutorial zone, so you are going to get sick of those first four levels very quickly. There are two early leveling zones, then Millenium City. The two zones are quite different from each other, but don't really offer any alternate branches for replaying, so it's a lot like the choice between the Barrens and Silverpine for the Horde. For most power combinations I tried, the first 10 levels were nearly identical. You start with 2 abilities: an weak auto-attack that builds Endurance, and a bigger attack that spends it. There is some token variation among these (some end-builders are ranged, some of the attacks can be charged up, or need to be held, etc), but the differences are minor. Upon completing the tutorial at level 5, you are gifted an orgasm of upgrades (you get no new powers during the tutorial, even though you "level up"), including a new fighting power, a travel power (what a blessing to get it this early!), a Super Stat, and a "talent" (stat boost, such as +8 Strength).

The upside on replayability is the flexibility of the character creator and the power system. Cryptic nailed the character creator. Prepare to hear raves about it in every review about the game. You can spend an hour in there, per character, and not even notice the time passing. There are enough options to make almost any humanoid you can imagine. I've seen everything from busty supergirls to robots to hulking Cthulu-lookalikes 5 times wider than the average man, to tiny people who only reach your knee, to hunched, slavering demons, to comically stretched-out beanpoles.

Combat is another mixed bag. It's a bit more action-oriented than other MMOs, and sports a much smaller pool of available abilities compared to competitors, though the block system and "roles" (similar to warrior stances) offer some extra depth. The low ability count is both a blessing and a curse: while easy to learn and pleasingly streamlined, it also has a tendency to get even more repetitive than WoW.


One thing I want to bring to the forefront concerning the beta is how quickly Cryptic makes changes and improvements to every aspect of the game. The open beta so many see today is almost unrecognizable as the closed beta I first launched 2 months ago - and even the closed beta I played 2 weeks ago - especially when it comes to interface and useability. So I'd recommend against being dismissive of the game because of minor issues. So many things I had been prepared to complain about were fixed in the open beta - and not only fixed, but brought up to exceed my expectations and surprise me. The early closed beta was a mess, but the open beta fixes almost every issue I had, and more. The costume creator makes more sense, the controls are easier to set up (the game gives you full control setup packages at the start, including one modeled almost exactly after WoW), the power tooltips are now actually informative. They must have been working hard over at Cryptic HQ to polish the game.




TL;DR version: Buy Champions Online if you:

• Want to feel like a superhero
• Care a lot about aesthetics. The game looks and feels great, and is full of visual customizability, aesthetic novelty, and vanity items.
  
• Want to play a WoW-alike with less depth but more action
• Would enjoy a further refinement of the WoW playstyle with even greater accessibility
• Like soloing as much as you like grouping

Do not buy Champions Online if:

• You think games that lack open-world PvP or "real consequences for failure" are for "carebears" (go play Darkfall instead, you'll like it!)
• You don't really like superheroes
• Strongly prefer slower and more complicated games that are a bit more work to figure out, like EQ, and dislike how accessible or action-oriented WoW is in comparison
  
• You are really sick of questing
• You don't care at all about aesthetics, or strongly dislike those of CO
  
• Are only interested in group dungeon crawls and have no interest in soloing

Champions Online is currently in "open beta" (requiring preorder or, I believe, Fileplanet membership) and will be released on Tuesday, September 1.


UPDATE (8/31/09):

The comments gave me a few good ideas of things I'd like to add.

Champions contains a mechanism for microtransactions. This is supposed to encompass things like novelty and vanity items and additional character slots. None of the purchasables are implemented yet, as far as I can tell, and little information is known about the details.

If you won't buy the game simply because it has a mechanism for microtransactions, then I encourage you to stay away from Champions so I don't have to interact with you. WoW has microtransactions too, called, for instance, paid server transfers, so you better cancel that account too, kthxbai. Learn about the prices and what is on offer before you dismiss the game. You may find you have no interest in what is for sale, and also find the game quite complete and worthwhile without the microtransactions.

There are more than enough costume options and character slots (8) available for my needs, so it doesn't bother me. If the microtransactions were blocking heavy swaths of content, then I'd be pissed. Again, consider the details of the particular system rather than dismissing something out of hand as soon as the word "microtransaction" is mentioned.

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For me, the carrot luring me through the levels is being able to get more powers to play with. If that doesn't sound exciting to you, then consider what it is that excites you about a new game before you buy Champions. Champions plays a lot like WoW. It is a questing game. You will kill ten rats, you will fedex, you will collect 15 monster teeth, you will click on 5 objects, and you will escort someone defenseless through packs of enemies. If you are tired of questing and are tired of WoW's gameplay, don't buy Champions. If you enjoy WoW's gameplay and just want a change of setting, aesthetic, and a fresh, streamlined look at the character-development systems, then give Champions a chance.

One big mistake it makes is that it starts slowly, and holds your hand through the tutorial (it assumes you've never played an MMO before). A lot of the more exciting stuff doesn't happen until the later levels, such as the Nemesis system and the meatier team missions. However, leveling is fast. The game appears to be much more focused on encouraging you to level multiple characters to try out all kinds of powers and costumes, and much less focused on getting one "main" to the endgame and grinding away. This makes me suspect that replay value is going to be kind of poor if you care a lot about content, because you'll end up leveling each character through the same zones over and over. Hopefully it won't come to that, but it is something to caution you about. Hopefully patches will expand the game laterally by adding more leveling content.

I very much enjoy Champions, but I cannot recommend it to everyone. The best way to make your buying decision is to gather as much information as you can about it, and see if those things appeal to you.