City of Heroes Review (no fat)

Game Description

City of Heroes is a 3d role playing game, in which you take the persona of a hero; who is stacked against the criminals of Paragon City. As you team up with the other heroes in Paragon City, your ultimate mission is to make it a safer and a villain-free zone.

City of Heroes Gameplay and Avatar Creation

The avatar creation process takes place offline. It is a detailed process that determines who you are and how and why you got the powers of a super hero. Your choices determine the base abilities and powers of your character and the powers you’ll be able to acquire with experience.

The next stage involves choosing your combat type from options which includes; blaster, controller, defender, scrapper and tanker. Each category has its strong as well as weak points and to deal with the Paragon City criminals, its important that you have a balanced team that can attack, defend, heal and do some ranged fighting as well. Also, you have to choose your primary and secondary powers before you can move on to decide upon the costume and the look of your super hero or heroine.

City of Heroes - Making your Debut

Once you are done with the avatar customization, you will jump into the tutorial where you will run a few assorted missions that will give you some idea of the interface and the gameplay. The tutorial lets you draw into the story right from the beginning. The whole game is woven around the plot that involves dealing with combat and fighting off villains. There is no pretence in City of Heroes; You don’t trade, do any PvP fighting or go in jungles to fight beasts and dragons. While this is different, it is by no means welcome to all MMO fans. Even fighting can get boring at times and had it not been for the smart thugs and gangs of City of Heroes, the game could have lulled many a heroes to sleep.

Apart from the fact that your enemies look different mainly because of the clothes they are wearing, the fights in COH can be monotonous yet never boring. The criminals attack in numbers, the bigger your group the bigger the opposition gang. To top it off, they have the common sense to flank you if you are outnumbered or run away if they are really taking a hiding.

City of Heroes Contacts & Missions

As soon as you set foot in Paragon city, other Heroes or Groups will start to contact you. Once you win their trust they will trade with you as well. As your contacts get stronger, they may decide to give you their contact information, so you’ll be able to contact them without physically going to meet them. Each contact will specialize in a criminal organization, and will send you on missions to track a particular criminal group.

There are three levels of enemies that you will come against during the course of the game. The idea is to pick your fights wisely, making a powerful boss angry might mean being hunted down by a pack of criminals for the rest of your hero days.

City of Heroes Enhancements and Rewards

Looting is not a part of City of Heroes, even as it gives the heroes some dignity, this can disappoint quite a few MMO fans who love to plunder stuff from their enemies to get their hands on the rarest items. The game features a system known as skill enhancement system. The enhancements are randomly acquired whenever you defeat your foes. Each enhancement can only be used with a certain player level so there is encouragement for trading between players.

New enhancements can be merged with older ones, to improve their potency. Also the rewards available are simple, as enemies may drop enhancements for superpowers. Everything from rescuing civilians to foiling a coup attempt generates influence points, which makes up the general economy of the City of Heroes.

City of Heroes Losses and Player Points

In case an enemy gets too hot to handle, you can use the ‘revive inspiration’ option to rush to the nearest hospital for healing. However in case of an unfortunate demise, you will have to pay 500 points worth of debt. This means that half of the experience you generated will go into paying off the debt while the other half will pile up to get you to the next security level. So even if you are having a hard time with your debt piling up, you will be moving forward with experience, albeit at a slower rate.

City of Heroes Side Kick ability

In COH, players of level 11 or more can get lower level players to join their group as sidekicks. Kudos to NC Soft, because no one else thought it up, and yet it is such a good idea that makes it possible for friends to play together even while being on different experience levels.

City of Heroes The Technicalities

The game requires a minimum of 800 MHZ CPU, 256MB Ram, 3D graphics and will work on 98, ME 2K, and XP.

City of Heroes Graphics

The graphics used in the game are excessive and detailed. They also maintain cohesion the closer you get; billboards and paintings don’t become pixilated if you stand beside them. Things remain in focus and sharp.

However, it’s worth noting that you can fight all you want in Paragon City, but you are not going to influence your environment in any way. So you can’t pick up a car to heave onto your enemy or beat him up with an electricity pole. Paragon is indeed a special City, its break proof.

City of Heroes Sound FX

There is not much of a voice acting in the game. The closest you are likely to get is hearing some crunching or grunting sounds when you are hopping between places. However the rest of the sound input is great. The background sound of the Paragon City gives the air of a major city hub. Also, each power comes with its own special sound effects. However, a few words do overstay their welcome; for instance, your inner hero might have to fight the urge to give the annoying civilians a jolt or two because their grateful words are extremely repetitive.

City of Heroes Summing up

The game certainly looks poised to deliver on its promises. The range of options available to players makes playing the game an engaging experience.

During the course of the game, a whole lot of features of the game can be tapped into to add to the enjoyment. The ability to form your own group of super heroes offers the incentive to become the premier anti-evil group in the city.

However, the strictly combat oriented plot and storyline of the game means, that interest in the game may decrease after a certain period of time, if the developers fail to come up with variety in their follow up patches and expansion packs.

City of Heroes Cost

City of Heroes retails for $29.99 at the time of writing. After a 14 day trial period, players are charged a monthly subscription fee of US$14.95