I love superheroes.  In fact the only movies that I'm likely to see in the theatre are superhero movies.  Everything else can wait until it hits DVD.  (And some superhero movies wait too)

So when City of Heroes came out I played it.  And it was allright, but too static and boring.  It got stale and I quit playing it before my free month was even up back in ... what 2004?  A few years ago for whatever reason, I went back and tried CoH again and played for a couple months, enjoying it because now my wife and I were playing together and it was a fun getaway.  But really, it was kind of boring and once we got over how much fun it was to fly around at supersonic speed the game was shelved.

When Champions Online was released, I tried the demo.  The demo consisted of playing through the tutorial basically.  It was a horrid game.  Horrible.  I hated it completely.  It was boring, the demo only allowed you to redo the same 6 missions, and not see any more of the game besides ugly comic book outlined cartoon characters.  I was in fact a little amazed that they didn't allow you to try out the character creation system, and they didn't allow you to gain any new abilities in the demo.  How the hell were you supposed to know if it was worth buying?  Disgusted I uninstalled it and never went back.

DC Universe came out.  I knew it was a clunker before it hit the shelves, but my wife and I were kinda bored with WoW so we bought it and played it.  It was fun enough, but it suffered from horrid controls due to them trying to dual release it for the PS3 and the computer, and it suffered from COH syndrome....static boring lifeless city landscapes.  And very few people playing.

Well then Champions Online went free to play.  And my wife and I were looking for a new game so we were slowly cycling through free to play games to see if any caught our attention.  In rapid succession we went back through DDO (too long since we played, couldn't get into it), LOTRO, and a couple of others, before deciding to install Champions and give it another try post tutorial.

We found in the options how you could shut off the cartoony outlining.  YAY! Victory #1. 

And then we played the same boring tutorial as we played a couple years ago.  Ugh.  We got to the end of the tutorial and quit again. 

A couple weeks later I told my wife I wanted to see if there was life post tutorial, so we could decide if it was worth playing and uninstall it if not. 

I logged in a new character, went thru the tutorial, and this time even tho I was bored and didn't want to play anymore, I forced myself to play for another few minutes to see what gameplay was like in the "real game". 

This has never happened before to me in my history of gaming (i started on the commodore 64 in the mid '80s...my first real business venture was a downtown computer gaming lounge where customers competed head to head on a LAN...i've been in computers and computer gaming for a long....long .... time...). 

I simply cannot believe the difference in this game from tutorial to post tutorial.  This game is FUN.  There is a full, animated world of adventurers running around, a great random group finder system, a fully customizable character creation setup, and a complete world of comic book style installment adventures and quests to do.  A crafting system for making your own gear, a system where you can unlock more costume components. 

Simply put, this game does a complete 180 after the tutorial.  I'm completely addicted.  I even started multiboxing a "tank" and "dps" character while my wife played a "healer".  I can't believe it. The rollout model this company used is terrible.  They cleverly hid a fantastic game under the shoddy veneer of a crappy game. 

Give it a try if you're into MMORPG's and if you're into superheroes.  And when you find yourself annoyed with the tutorial...for the first 5 levels or so ... take a break and come back later.  It's well worth it.  I was so stunned by the difference I felt compelled to come here and spit out a full post for the perusal of people who probably really couldn't care less

Queshank