City of Heroes (PC)

City of Heroes and Villains is a download-only MMORPG which is based on creating and levelling your desired superhero or Villain, and then taking part in an open city landscape beating up the bad guys of all different shapes and sizes. You will meet Ents, bosses made of ice and Evil Super villains and all their minions who want to rule the world along the way, and you can battle them on your own or join your superhero or villain friends in groups to defeat them.

Creating your superhero is a task that may take you five minutes or two hours. There is a huge array of costume pieces to pick from, with plenty of different colours. You choose an Archetype for your character which grants you powers unique to that archetype. You then give your character powers chosen from a pool of powers, or power pools, of which you get to pick two. For instance if you enjoyed causing damage you could pick the Archetype Blaster, which will give higher damage then other archetypes but will lower your health and defence. You could then assign the skills Archery and Devices from the power pools but be careful as once these power pools are chosen you are stuck with them throughout the game on this character. As your character level increase you will be given access to new powers from the power pools you chose. During the process of levelling you will be given the choice of a travel power, which could be Super Speed, Flying or even Teleporting and at the last levels you receive your epic power pool which I’ll leave it to you to discover.

Once you create your hero or Villain you will be able to choose between going to the tutorial or starting in the full game environment. The tutorial is good and well designed to give you a lot of game knowledge as quickly and as easily as possible, and if you’re a first time gamer you should work through it. Once you either leave the tutorial or go to Atlas Park (your main beginner environment) you should go straight into levelling all the way to the max level 50. At the beginning you will be working alone but you can earn more experience by joining a team with up to seven other players. A higher levelled team member could accept you as their sidekick, which temporarily brings you up to their level so you can earn experience by taking part in fights that otherwise would have killed you. If you’re already a higher level character you can chose to be an exemplar for your team which temporarily brings you down to their level. While you’re an exemplar you will gain no experience but double the money you gain.

You’ve chosen your power pools and your new look, now it’s time to get out there and show them who is boss. Using your powers is as simple as dragging them into numbered slots on an easy to use toolbar, and you can either press the relevant number key on your keyboard or click on the power to launch great balls of fire or rocks at your opponent. The results of these attacks aren’t gory but they are violent so the game has been given a 16+ rating.

During the game you can pick up or purchase enhancements, which you slot into your powers through the enhancement page. You are allowed a maximum of 6 slots per power and the enhancements you put in these slots can increase the range, damage and accuracy of the power. You may also pick up inspirations, which are quick power-ups that only last a few seconds but can give you the edge over bosses or other players in PvP (Player V’s Player).

You can collect badges as you explore Paragon or complete certain tasks (like killing 100 Gold Brickers for example) and once you’ve collected enough badges you will receive an accolade, which may give you increased hp (Health Points), mp (Mana Points, used as energy for powers) or unique abilities. Badges also give you a badge title, which once chosen is displayed below your name.

For every three months you play the game you earn a veteran award. These rewards include extra costume pieces, respec tokens (a token to purchase the ability to change the powers you have within your first and second power pools), extra weapons and abilities to use in the war against villains or heroes.

City of Heroes and Villains is updated every few months by NCsoft and Cryptic. These updates are called issues and each issue includes updates such as minor bug fixes and new content. The most recent content is the Architect Entertainment, in which you get to create your own missions. Future new content will include the ability to change the colour of all your powers.

The game does offer PvP where you can use the PvP maps to wage war against Heroes or Villains or go to the arena to battle your friends, but not many people do it since one of the issues changed the PvP rules for the worse. There are still a small group of people who you will find in the PVP areas but far less than there used to be.

Being an older game, City of Heroes and Villains will run on most computers less than five years old. The main requirements are 4GB of hard drive space and a decent internet connection, but a better graphics card would allow you to play the game at a higher graphic setting. The game can get laggy especially in a full team with a lot of NPC’s (non-playable characters) around you so you might have to turn the graphics back down in order to deal with it.

My personal impression of the game is that it is very good, the open game world just makes you want to continuously roam around and explore. The wide range of costume pieces and powers that are available still amazes me. The game can be quite repetitive as the mission maps you will see at the beginning are reused throughout, and the mission objectives are nearly always along the same lines, be it “kill such and such” or “collect this and that”, but even with that, you still have the enjoyment of beating up a huge group of enemies.

Review by Unsaintlyjesus