City of Villains

"Great Game Buried Beneath Tech Issues"

The question I wrestle with as I play CoV is, just how much am I willing to put up with for a good game? I've payed $15 a month before; I can justify that. I've been booted from servers before, whether it's an MMO on the PC, an FPS on an Xbox or a certain kart racer on the DS. I can deal with that, too. I can except high amounts of stutter and a string of unimportant but annoying glitches. I can even wait through nigh interminable loading times, if the game is good enough. But when you bunch all these issues into a single game, I have to draw the line.

Before I get ahead of myself, allow me to mitigate. Not everyone who plays CoV deals with all the above. That's what the chatboards will tell you, anyway. But many people will deal with most of them. (And everybody will deal with $15 a month.) I personally ran this game on a decent but not top-of-the line machine, with the graphics adjusted accordingly. That is another factor, of course, but you could run this game on future alien technology and you'd still be harassed by NCsoft's subpar servers and questionable programming (I'm referring to the known memory leak). On to the review!

Graphics 8/10
Not as good as Half Life 2, but better than City of Heroes (at least the CoH from 2 years ago when I played). Some of the effects, particularly higher-level powers, look awesome. Especially rad was the addition of rag doll effects. I'm used to MMO's with standard animations for felled foes. Not so with CoV! I've seen dead enemies doubled over railings or contorted hysterically against walls, and I love it when an enemy is thrown into the air, flailing powerlessly under the force of your dark energies. The graphics are pretty decent for a game and really spectacular for an MMO.

Sound 6/10
Yes, it's got sound. Nothing breathtaking. The voice acting consists mainly of the grunting noise every time you jump. The music's not bad, varying between hardcore metal and hardcore drum & bass, pretty evil sounding stuff.

Gameplay 4/10 (should be 10/10)
The game the developers were going for and the game you're going to play are two entirely different things. It's like someone threw up on the Mona Lisa. You can easily see something great under there, but it's ruined and kind of stinky. At first go, the game was laughably choppy. It was almost cute. I learned to go ahead and lower those graphical standards. Why the character detail is set to the highest standard, clearly labeled not recommended right out of the box, the world may never know. But if you have a gig of RAM and a nice graphics card, this kind of thing will not be your experience. All the RAM in the world will not, however, fix the stuttering. It's like Foghorn Leghorn took a couple night classes at ITT Technical and got on with NCsoft as a coder. And let me be clear on one thing. I have never played on a fully loaded server. By the time you get up to even a medium load, the stuttering, load times, disconnection frequency, general glitchiness just about render the game unplayable. City of Villains is the single biggest shame that was ever written. A game this good deserves better treatment.

So what exactly is so good, someone might ask. Almost everything. Let me talk about the way the game would be, if it were to start running evenly tomorrow. First, the basic concept is just awesome. Anyone who is or has ever been a ten year old boy would love to run around as a super villain, causing trouble, beating up old ladies. (Even some girls get into it(!).) Additionally, the game has platformer overtones. Finding ways over fences and even buildings to get from point A to point B is actually fun, as opposed to the typical MMO autorun *coughWorldOfWalkingcough*. And that's before you even get your travel power. At level 14 you can choose between the ability to fly like Superman, jump like the Hulk, teleport like the Nightcrawler, or run like the Flash. Again, this is literally the one MMO I've encountered in which traveling is a delight, City of Heroes notwithstanding. The character building is simplistic but not trivial. As your character grows, no matter which of the five archetypes (i.e. classes) you choose, you will have to make tough choices as to which powers to incorporate and which ones to invest in with the enhancement system. There is no equipment at all in this game, only those aforementioned enhancements that proffer an enjoyable if not overly complex build system. Good stuff. On the other hand, leveling is a little slow, more on the level with your FFXI than your WoW. Some people like that; I prefer immediate gratification, but I can deal.

Then there's the nonpareil character creation. It's really more like The Sims than any other MMO. If you played City of Heroes, you know what I'm talking about. You can make a reasonable facsimile of any hero you desire, although I would not recommend it because NCsoft will change your appearance and name to generics in order to avoid copy write problems. In fact, they actually upped the ante from the CoH days, adding plenty more clothing options and a whole slew of sliding scales for shaping the head alone. The first thing I did when I got this game was to create a bevy of neat looking characters, including but not limited to an insectoid mutant in a seersucker suit, an undead pirate, a terrifying bat-vampire hybrid, a dorky, evil professor with a comb-over, the typical zombie (with blood stained hands! and exposed bones! cleverly named Abner Cadaver!), a vaguely Japanese looking wolf-headed god, and finally a Michael Jackson look-alike who summons zombies. Rad, rad stuff. Character creation is truly a game unto itself. Honestly, most of the fellow player characters you bump into look pretty insipid and have uninspired names, but every once in a while you come across a real gem. And, hey, you creative types out there will just be thrown into sharper relief.

Closing Thoughts
Okay. I really love this game. But it sucks so bad. It's like the girl you know you shouldn't date but keep coming back to. Just writing those last two paragraphs, I have convinced myself to stick around for another month. Geez, I just wish they would fix it! I play for a while, become enraged by a glitched load screen, swear, and go read a book. It's a ritual. If this kind of frustrated addiction seems at all inviting to you, get the game. Otherwise, stick with something you can resell if it pisses you off.
Limbic out.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/16/06