Champions Online Preview, Screenshots

GameSpot has whipped up an informative three-page preview of Champions Online after spending a little firsthand time with the superhero MMORPG.
After creating our own supervillain, we set out to conquer the jailbreak on Monster Island by entering an instanced dungeon-like area, in which we fought our way through a prison that was more or less being run by the inmates--who were actually the henchmen of one of our teammate's archvillains (cowboy robots, in this case). While this mission had a lot of straightforward combat in the form of beating down any enemies that dared to face our super-powered team, it also had several interesting twists and turns and scripted events that seem like they'll make dungeon crawling in Champions a much more interesting experience than just moving from room to room in search of new victims to pummel.

For starters, these areas will have ongoing lists of objectives that update automatically as you complete them; in several of the early areas, for instance, we were tasked with rescuing besieged prison guards who, when they came to, would unlock the doors to the next part of the dungeon. We continued our advance through the corridors in the prison in search of our foe, but also found another imprisoned supervillain, locked away in a centrally-located cell, who taunted us constantly. Fighting this fiend wasn't central to our story mission (we didn't bother fighting him, actually), but if we had freed him from his cell, we could have gotten into an extra battle with incidental awards. As it was, we preferred to let him rot, and he continued to let us have it...verbally, as he followed our progress through the prison and taunted us mercilessly. After finally locating and pummeling the prison's boss, we then moved on to a larger challenge--one of the game's story dungeons.
Additionally, there are three new screenshots available on the game's official website.