Product Description

What Hero Will You Be?

Millennium City may be full of heroes, but there's always room for more souls brave enough to face the villains and evil masterminds determined to take control of the world.

 

Build a Better Character

You get detailed breakdowns of every Framework, including advice on how to select your budding character's abilities.

 

Tackle Early Missions with Confidence

Beyond a thorough discussion of the game's controls, this guide also has a complete walkthrough of your first mission: Alien Attack!

 

Know Where You're Going

Detailed zone maps for every area of Champions Online: Southwest Desert, Canadian Wilderness, Millennium City, Monster Island, and Lemuria!

 

 

Platform: PC

Genre: Role-Playing Game

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108814 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

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Customer Reviews

Mislabled as strategy guide- says HERO CREATION GUIDE
If I had known that, I wouldn't have got it.

This is pretty worthless. It's not made of good material like Batman: Arkham Asylum (15th Anniversary Edition). The cover is like a thick magazine cover or super thin cardstock, the paper ultra thin where the ink comes off on hot sweaty hands leaving fingerprints. The edge of the cover scuffed within the first day just picking it up and setting it down. So much for quality

The guide is basically a guide of the tutorial, which you would learn anyway by going through the tutorial, which you are forced to do anyway with each character you create. It starts off with story and character profiles. Like when it tells you about Sapphire, it says that Foxbat is trying to romance her. Is this useful? NO! I would rather know her powers (they don't list anyone's powers) or that if you don't talk to her in the tutorial (you don't need to) you will miss out on a perk and may not get a chance to earn the perk.

I learned a total of 2 things from the manual. The Visual Sounds which was stolen from CoH's april fools announcement tells you the type and shape of powers you need to block. And the two Super Stats you pick affect the damage of your powers. (well, in most cases, but they don't list the exceptions.)

Then they list the powers, which have changed several times. Well, that was expected. But they don't tell you the synergies among powers or how to mix and match. They mention that defensive passives are the best, but they are already nerfed. And they don't mention powers that were awesome that are still awesome and haven't been nerfed. This section is slightly useful if you want to make heroes based on a theme, not on use.

Then they have a walk through of the tutorial! Really. The tutorial. This is worse than useless. They mention the missions you have to do in order and provide a map. The map does not mention where the perk is on top of the bug ship nor does the text. It does not list where you can find the Rescue the Cat Mission nor where you can rescue Foxbat and get his gun as a reward. It does not mention that Foxbat is watching at the celebration and you can talk to him. It only tells you what you encounter if you go in as straight a line as possible, and yet these were all available in beta.

Zero hints tips and tricks in this book, but they ask some developers questions like: What super power would you want in real life, who's your favorite comicbook character, and what kind of tree are you most like. Well, maybe not the last one, but nothing crunchy was asked and no brain cells were harmed or even strained by the questions.

If you want something useful read the forums.

Nothing to see here folks...
Don't make the same mistake I did and buy this manual assuming it would give you insight into how this game works. It doesn't and here are the main reasons why:

Many of the powers and descriptions were based from the beta and have been substantially changed in the release and even more so after release thanks to balance altering patches.

Also, the game was released 'not-finished'. While this particular detail is probably true of any MMO (Which I admittedly don't play many of) pertaining to this book; many strategies for building a character are just not valid. (Example: My Projector, made without this book, could take more punishment and survive longer than my Tank, who was made using this book. A flaw of the game mechanics or this manual or both?)

While the book does gives you some information pertaining to character creation mechanics (although you must adjust for patches), in truth, it is nothing you would not learn from playing the game for a couple of days anyway. In other words, redundant.

To put the last paragraph another way. The information contained within is superficial and thin. There is very little substance to give you any insight as to how everything works. It is fine for beginners but virtually useless after a few days.

Presumably another more comprehensive book will be released at a later date that I am sure will better encompass what this game is about. Wait for that release, assuming the game lasts that long.

On a final note: The game itself is disappointing at the time of this review, I will not write a review for it specifically because my understanding is MMO's tend to be ongoing works in progress and I have canceled my subscription and won't be around to see it evolve.

Limited information
The game ships with little to no detailed information on how to play, so I picked this guide up to try to fill in the gaps. The only problem is that this guide did not do that. It has very limited information that is mostly available elsewhere - save your money.