Our adventure began in a safe room filled with dummies garbed in cowboy robot apparel. A set of stairs led up to the room's only exit. Standing beside the doorway was our guide: Captain Cryptic, a hulk of a man whose red costume and blue boots resembled an inverted Superman outfit. The Cryptic designer in control of the Captain advised us to familiarize ourselves with our pre-made heroes and their powers before beginning our quest in the wild, wild west.

My alter ego was appropriately named Force, also an impressive physical specimen who sports blue and white attire not unlike that of Defender, the main hero in the Champions universe. Force, like all of the other heroes, was both pre-made and named to demonstrate the unique superpower customization options available in the game. Aptly named, Force came equipped with a number of Star Wars-esque force abilities: instead of simple kicks and punches, I wielded mental blasts that sent invisible shock waves at enemies, stunning or knocking them back.


PC players desiring to play with a keyboard and mouse will find that Champions controls much like any other MMO: WASD handles forward, backward, and strafe movement; swiveling the mouse adjusts the camera; and skills are mapped to the top row of number keys.

Playing with the keyboard and mouse would have been straightforward, but my curiosity got the better of me. In a genre dependent on extra toolbars and dozens of keys, I desired to get a feel for how Cryptic chose to handle eight buttons -- 12 if you include individual d-pad arrows -- instead of more than 100.

Attacks are mapped to the X, Y and B buttons, while Jump is predictably tied to A. Holding LT switches the functions of the three attack-based face buttons, so even though players might not be able to quickly access their entire catalog of skills, six should be adequate enough for most battles. Pressing LB and RB cycles between hostile and friendly targets. Upon a single press, Force turned toward one of the dummies, prompting us to pound the stuffing out of them before moving on to cowboy robots.


Each player will have a basic attack that does a minimal amount of damage but increases a significant portion of energy, represented by a blue bar at the top of the screen. Instead of barreling into his brainless opponent with left and right hooks, Force fires bolts of energy. A few blasts was all it took to sufficiently raise my meter and allow the casting of Force Eruption, a powerful knockback skill, and Force Blast, a larger energy missile than the default attack mapped to X.

After decimating enemies that couldn't fight back -- my favorite kind -- I looked toward the door and noticed Captain Cryptic jumping in place, apparently signaling it was time to move out. The door opened into a long hallway which led outside onto a parking lot. A neon side at one end flashed "Snake Gulch." Past it, pavement gave way to rough desert terrain that dipped down in tiers, eventually leading into the bottom of the gulch where ASCII Oakley and the rest of Snake Gulch's robotic denizens awaited our arrival.