The developers behind the game, Cryptic Studios, are the creators of the award-winning City of Heroes and City of Villains titles on the PC back in 2005, so the credentials are certainly there. PC gamers will obviously be familiar with the genre, and Champions Online will be fully equipped for 360 gamers to fight alongside their mouse and keyboard counterparts. However, the question of whether the absence of any offline gameplay will deter a fair majority of console owners is one that seemed to make even Microsoft nervous - even though we doubt PC owners will have the same issue.

Ever since the first announcement was made, every release came with the disclaimer “Champions Online is not yet concept approved by Microsoft”, which made many believe, including us, that whilst Cryptic was keen on pushing the title on the 360, perhaps Microsoft wasn’t quite so confident of success. After all, Shadowrun came with a single-player campaign and that didn’t fare too well on either platform. However, we’re assured that the concept is now fully approved, and that it was more a case of orchestrating the cross-platform gaming than actually asking what the heck an online-only game is doing on a next-gen console.

But what of the game itself? If you haven’t heard of the Champions universe before, it started life as an old-school pen and paper RPG back in the early ’80s. Its hook back then was that it used a point-based system of upgrading and customising your character rather than simply rolling dice to see who won a fight or got the best armour – something which is, of course, at the heart of almost every videogame RPG in modern times. Whilst many console gamers can remain sceptical that this is enough to pad out a world of presumably infinite game time, we have to acknowledge, that in concept at least, Champions Online does have some appeal.

Set in the fictional-and-not-at-all-originally-named setting of Millennium City, you’re asked by one of the few core superheroes, Defender, to suit up and protect the city (and many places far beyond) from a variety of suitably evil villains, all intent on their own form of global domination. You design your hero from scratch, choosing your outfit, your powers, your strengths (and subsequent weaknesses), your hero’s back story and just about everything else you can think of. You don’t even have to be human, with options to mix and match animals (cats, bears and wolves etc), insects and monsters such as aliens, demons and, oh yes, the undead. To round things off you can then do the same thing all over again – but this time to create your very own personal nemesis.

Where would a superhero be with an arch-villain to tackle during those quiet times? The gameplay looks smooth and pretty fluent from what little we’ve seen. The turn-based combat appears fast and intuitive, and it feels like a blend of Penny Arcade Adventures on XBLA and any X-Men or Fantastic Four title from the past few years. However the gameplay fares, though, Champions Online will have to be something pretty super-heroic to drag console gamers away from Gears of War or Call of Duty: World at War's online modes, even if it is out some several months later. After all, on a tough day those will always have single-player modes that you can brush up your skills or unleash your fury upon without thousands of people watching.