City of Heroes

"MMO for the ages"

City of Heroes is as you all know a MMORPG. Since it is online you will have to pay a monthly fee. Depending on how you want to pay will depend on how much you pay. Monthly will be about 15 bucks, pay it 3 months at a time will be a bit cheaper per month, and 6 months at a time will be even cheaper. The price isn't dramatically cheaper, but saving is saving. You will need over a gig of ram for the game, and a high speed internet connection to play it.

The game is divided onto 11 different servers, you can have up to 8 heroes per server for a total of 88 heroes all together. I have said many times that I play on the Freedom server. The Freedom server seems to have the largest amount of heroes that play on it so on weekends tend to have a large load, making the game lag a bit.

The character creation is probably the best part of the game. You pick what sex you want your hero to be and decide his/her muscle mass. Then you get to pick your Archetype and Origin. The Archetypes are: Blaster, Controller, Defender, Scrapper, and Tanker. The Origins are: Mutant, Science, Technology, Natural, and Magic. Origins don't effect your strength, they only effect the type of enhancements you can use on your powers. I'll go into small detail of the Archetypes shortly. After choosing all that you go to your costume chooser. I spent a great deal of time playing around with this. You have an unbelievable amount of choices to create your unique image. It is very rare to see more than one person have the same costume as you. If it happens it is usually on purpose. I have only seen one other person with anything similar to my costume. When you finally finish your costume, you will create a name and bio for your hero. The bio isn't required immediately, I suggest waiting until after you get your name before starting your bio.

The Archetypes are pretty much character classes. The Blaster is best with offense and is meant to hang back and dish out the pain. A Blaster doesn't have a real good defense, so if he is heavily outnumbered he is in trouble. Controllers are pretty much what the name says, they control the minds of their enemies. They have a low defense and not a real heavy attack. Defenders are your healers. They can't do much damage or take a lot of punishment. The Scrapper has a great defense and the best offensive power. The Scrapper can take on a lot of enemies without worrying about dying. The Tanker has the best defense and a second rate offense.

I won't go into archetype powers since that will take far too long, and I'm pretty lazy.

Your first stop in game is the tutorial area. Don't skip it, since you will gain an easy level. It is basic stuff, learning the controls and what not. After you complete the tutorial area you will level up and be able to choose either to go to Atlas Park or Galaxy City. There you will find the trainer and train up to level 2 and pick your next power. Your first contact will be inside either Paragon City Hall or the Freedom Corps building. Depending on your Origin will determine which contact you end up with.

When you level up you will have to go back to a trainer to obtain your new power or two new enhancement slots. You will gain a new power on every even level, and two enhancement slots on every odd level. Leveling up is pretty easy early on, but as you get higher it becomes very hard to level up. Early on you could level a couple times during one sit through, but once you get up to level 15 or so it becomes much more difficult to level in one sitting.

There is a lot of stuff that I haven't even touched on. The power sets, enhancements, enemies, missions, team play, sidekicking, and a lot of other things that you will have to see for yourselves.

Soon there will be an update that will add more costume choices, face choices, and the like. There will also be an Arena that will allow player vs. player. The PvP aspect of the update is going to be sweet. Now you can take on other players and see who is the strongest, and talk trash after the match.

In the near future there will be an expansion City of Villains, where you can actually create your own villain and take on the heroes. I don't know a whole lot about CoV, but I'm hoping it will be good.

I give City of Heroes for the PC a 10 out of 10.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 02/14/05