Early travel powers and costume design are cool, but they don't compensate for the terrible social menu.
Creating a character concept, a costume for that character, and then a power set is fun. However if you want to interact with humans, your build set is fairly limited. Some powers are just better then others, and some work better in combinations. Still this concept is novel and quite entertaining for a time, almost certainly the first month.
While most missions/quests are interesting in some way there is a disconnect in the delivery that leaves you feeling removed from the experience, but only compared to the story of WoW and Warhammer Age of Reckoning. The grind in Champions is very palpable, and quests are a thinly veiled guise on the concept (though not so thin as LOTR).
The monsters are standard fair, they are in specific spawn locations and either sit and wait in that one place or have a set wandering path. They don't team up, chase you very far, or provide much challenge.
The world design and spacing is also typical for the current generation of MMOs. Thankfully you receive travel powers at level 5 which makes navigating the all too common pointlessly large/devoid of content cities and exteriors tolerable, and more or less easy. Though navigation could be improved with visual indicators since certain types of flight, as well as teleportation, lack the visual ques that you might ordinarily use to navigate.
Like most online games, champions has an auction house. Considering how recent an addition it is, the auction house is a little difficult to navigate and plagued by the MMO worthless gold issue.
I was unable to find shopkeepers that sold anything of value, but they will sell you plans to make many of the items you'd like to create anyway. Though not all of them. And the crafting system is easy to navigate and "master" if a little uninteresting and grind heavy after the first few levels.
I became incredibly bored of this game by level 15, and while high levels of boredom have become acceptable in MMOs at large it is unacceptable to me.