City of Heroes

"Interesting fare, if somewhat flawed."

City of Heroes is a unique online RPG in that it puts you into the role of a superhero, rather than that of your average fantasy adventurer.

Graphics: 8/10
The animations for the majority of the attacks are quite smooth, and the particle effects, both from attacks and from the later costume options are very nice looking. There can be a lot of slowdown when there are a ton of people firing off big attacks all at once though.

One big plus here is the character generator. With so many options, it's damn near impossible to find someone that has the same look as you, unless you were emulating an already established character like the Juggernaut. While special options like capes and aura effects like a flaming body or electrical arcs around your hands aren't available at initial creation, you can add them at later levels and can have up to 4 costumes for your character at level 40.

Story: 6/10
One of the big draws (for me at least) to City of Heroes was it's detailed and unique backstory. There's a full backstory on Paragon City on the City of Heroes website, one that even explains why there is this incredible proliferation of heroes appearing in Paragon. The main drawback is that you really don't get to experience a story ingame. While playing, you do run into series of missions that are all linked into a 'story arc,' but these generally don't have any real impact on the game world, and multiple people get the same arcs and missions, so it's fully possible to team up with someone, and arrest the same Boss villain twice inside of 20 minutes. One plus side is that there are occasional ingame events that are interesting and do add to the story of Paragon City, like the Rikti and Rularuu invasions.

Music/Sound: 4/10
The music is nothing impressive, there isn't any constantly playing music, just a few short clips that play upon entering different areas within a section of the city. Sound effects can be nice, as the slicing sounds of a broadsword or katana indicate, but if you made a poor choice for a powerset, you may either shut your sound off, or delete that character in frustration. Some powers generate annoying looping sounds for as long as you keep them active, which isn't so bad with some powers that are attacks or heals, but when playing a regeneration or dark armor character, who's powers need to be up all the time for defense/damage mitigation, the experience can be excruciating.

Gameplay: 7/10
Here's the biggest mixed bag. On one hand, the gameplay is extremely repetitive. Target an enemy, click an attack power, repeat until enemy or you falls, gain XP, repeat until you gain a level, then find new and more powerful things to kill. Repeat. You can gain levels by arresting the random enemies in the streets, or by doing missions. If you choose to take missions from your contacts, they're really only two types; door missions and kill missions. Kill missions are fairly straightforward, in that you have to kill X number of a certain faction of enemies. Door missions are more widely varied, but generally amount to finding a door on a map, entering a new map, and clearing it of enemies. There are different objectives, like saving X number of people, retreiving items, protecting objects/people, but don't vary too much besides what group of villains you're fighting.

However, some of the recent patches have helped with the repetitiveness of the mission based game. Certain missions unlock rewards in the form of extra costume bits, like capes and auras, or badges, which if certain sets are collected, grant special powers. Badges are awarded for a variety of different actions as well, including exploring maps, reading ingame plaques about the history of Paragon City, taking down certain numbers of specific groups, damage taken, healing given, taking down legendary and unique Monster class villains (of which there are only one on a server at any given time) in addition to the mission based badges. Also, heroes who made poor choices in what powers they chose as they level can "respecify" what powers they wanted to take at what level as a reward for completing particular mission arcs.

Overall: 6/10
I have a love/hate relationship with CoH. It will draw me to play it for days at a stretch, but will eventually frustrate me into putting it down. After a week or two though, I come back, drawn by it's siren song. I think it's a great game, in small doses. Definately worth the initial ~$50 or so, but at 15 bucks a month for my 'small doses,' it's highly debatable if the subscription is worth it or not. If you're thinking of buying this game now, I'd suggest waiting for the PvP expansion of City of Villains first.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/28/04