It was a dark and stormy night when the call came in from LA.

"Hey kid. The suits upstairs have been impressed by your work in Metropolis and Gotham. They want you to look into the goings on down in Millennium City now."

Last thing I wanted was to be up my neck in caped freaks again, but hey, a job's a job right?

"OK, Boss." I said. "What's the skinny on the situation down there? I heard the last guy you sent down there went native."

The line went quiet and I could almost hear him shudder. "Yeah, I won't lie to you. We lost a lot of good guys down there. Maybe you should wear some kind of disguise. Ya know.....try to blend in."

And now, here I am. Slap bang in the middle of Champions Online Gold. Having never tried the game before, and with covering DC Universe Online for the last month or so, I figured it would be a good idea to try Champs for comparison. And since Cryptic and Atari went Free to Play with it last month, I figured now was as good a time as any.

Champions Online: Free For All went into beta in November of last year and was released in its current iteration on January 25th of this year.

In his press release in January, CEO of Cryptic Studios, John Needham said
"We are thrilled to be able to launch Champions Online: Free For All. The Champions Online Gold team has put an incredible amount of effort into making Free For All an amazing free-to-play MMO every gamer can enjoy at no cost."

Coming so hot on the heels of the release of DCUO, many saw this jump to F2P as a panicked move from Atari and Cryptic. It was time to give it a run and see how it measures up against its competition.

One quick registration later and the F2P client was downloading. The client took around 24 hours to pull down from the official download site. The installation was smooth and a quick patch later it was time to craft a hero.