So last week I cracked and bought City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer online game that tackles the world of superheroes. In addition to Walt's hearty recommendation of the game, most of the lads I played WoW with all migrated to City of Heroes as well, so I'm afraid I was left with no choice. Not having read a thing about it, I didn't know what to expect.

Basically, once you design your hero you go forth and fight crime, alone or in a group of up to 8 people. The large cities remind me a bit of the GTA games, where you can explore the nooks and crannies and find all sorts of ne'er-do-wells doing naughty things. In this game, you then proceed to punch, slash, gun-down, burn, freeze, or blast the miscreants into an early grave. The fighting is a lot of fun in this game, especially when utilizing abilities that knock your opponent around like a rag doll. The graphics are also pretty sweet, although some of the sound effects need work.

But there's more than just cleaning up the streets -- you can also go on missions into the villain's lairs for various purposes, from rescuing hostages to just kicking their asses. As you grow in power, the missions get bigger and tougher.

Overall it's a fun game, but it is a mixed bag. Here's my thoughts:

The Good:
- Impressive character creation system. Half of the fun of playing the first day was running around and just looking at other people's characters. Hopefully in the future they'll add capes, more weapons, and maybe some crazy shit like robotic limbs.
- A nice and simple system of choosing and upgrading powers.
- No worrying about looting corpses or who gets what. The only loot that drops are enhancements that you apply to your various powers, and these appear in your inventory automatically.
- No time-wasters. Log in and just go kick ass. Sort of an MMO version of GTA or Diablo.
- The game is damn fun.

The Not-So-Good:
- The mini-missions are instanced, which is good, but they're very repetitive. The same warehouse/cave/office/sewer maps are re-used ad-nauseum to the point where you've seen each one a dozen times in the course of a few days. I was excited to get one mission where I was to go to a club and break up a gang fight, only to find that it's the same warehouse setting that I've seen before with the same baddies standing in the same spots, except in this mission a few pedestrians were added to run around aimlessly. Wow, some club.
- The missions need more variety. So far they're mostly "go find and kill x number of such-and-such" or "go trash so-and-so's hideout and kill the boss". Now these aren't bad ideas for missions, it's just the sameness of them that's the problem, as I addressed above. One thing that World of Warcraft did that would rock for this game is to add larger instanced dungeon romps designed for a certain level range. For example, make an instance called "Dr. Squid's Lab" designed for level 12-15 heroes, where at any time you could get a group and spend a few hours battling through various bad guys and settings until you had a showdown with Squid himself. Beating him would net you a nice goody (in CoH, a nice goody would be a decent power enhancement).
- Some of the sound effects, like the punches, are really crappy. Others are really annoying, like this one buff that while applied to a team member emits a loud noise like a broken refrigerator.

I could nitpick some more, but I expect that Cryptic will be fixing and adding stuff as time goes on. The two content gripes I listed are for me the biggies. I will say, however, that City of Heroes is a strong beginning to what eventually could be an amazing game. It's certainly held the attention of my friends and I, but it's hard to say if we'll stick with it if the high level content is as repetitive as the lowbie stuff.

And now, without further ado, here are some of the stupid characters I whipped up:










Edit:
Whoa, I almost forgot the most important hero:



posted by Ubel at 5:38 PM