Well, got it on Friday and have tried out a few characters and currently have my main up to lvl 7 almost 8.
I still think what I thought before. Here's a brief synopsis. First the bad.
It's still your standard MMO. You'll kill lots of things in the same way lots of times to get more levels. As you all know, I HATE this style of MMO.
The GUI has some brilliant elements, but, overall isn't as intuitive as most others.
Just like WoW, you have no freaking clue what spell effects mean. Uh...this guy next to me cast a spell and now the mob is covered in a green haze.....wtf does that mean?
There's lots of running early on. Maybe later you can teleport, flying or super speed would make this much less of an issue, but it's noticeably tedious early on.
The good.
Character design. Obviously. I, again, ended up spending a few hours designing my character. There are so many possibilities. At first glance, it just looks like a lot of combinations, but, once you start to play with the color schemes and some of the more obscure designs, you can really get creative and personalize your character.
The community. By FAR the best community of any MMO. The first half hour I was in the game, a costume contest was announced and I partipated. I didn't win, but I had fun checking out everybody else. You get really awful monstrosities, very "silver age" looking traditional superheroes, pop culture parodies, and some very inventive creations. The official message boards are also full of mostly helpful people...I was surpsied since I expect a game a year old to be full of jaded people.
The mission environments are pretty varied. They go from burning office buildings to crystal caverns to sewers...and I've only done four so far.
The powers, while sometimes vague, are pretty cool. Lightning zaps are pretty violent. Gravity controllers lift mobs off the ground and then send them crashing down. Ice holds encase the mob in ice, etc. It's all very comic book-esque.
Overall.....I maintain my original statement. The game offers plenty of fun and challenge for 1-2 months of play. It's VERY solo player friendly, which is good fo the casual player, but also means about half the people you run into at low levels have very little group skills and it's mostly a free-for-all scrum when you take on some mobs.
They're expaniding the character creator as you can see on the test server. Most of the differences are in head and body shape, but there are a few more costume pieces too.
This is nothing but the standard MMO shlock, but with the flexible character design and solo player leanings, it's worth a look for a casual player. CoV will obviously offer a new dynamic, but that's still lookig like late Q3 at the earliest.
