Reviewed: April 27, 2004
Reviewed by: Aaron Daigle
Publisher
NCsoft
Developer
Cryptic Studios
Released: April 27, 2004
Genre: MMORPG
Players: Online
ESRB: Teen
10
9
9
10
9.5
System Requirements
Recommended System
When I told my neighbor I was reviewing City of Heroes his response was something along the lines of, ‘Oh, that Everquest comic book game?’ Now that his body has been stashed where the cops will never find it, I am here to tell you that City of Heroes from developer Cryptic Studios and NCSoft is in my opinion, without question, the pinnacle of the MMO genre.
And what exactly have they delivered? Well aside from one of the most problem free launches I’ve ever heard about, they ditched the whole swords and sorcery shtick that most of the successful MMOs use and replaced it with costumes and super powers. They ditched the whole stats, crafting, and economy shebang and replaced it with genuine butt-stomping gameplay. They shoved the wilderness settings into the airlock and built a modern day metropolis complete with a history, traffic, pedestrians, urban decay and the criminal element that helps it along. They put you in the boots of a neophyte hero and with a brief tutorial send you off to the first of many contacts you will make as you fight to remove the gangs, mutants, zombies, robots and aliens that plague your hometown.
Welcome to Paragon City, where the phrase, “level grind” isn’t in our vocabulary.
Nearly the entire focus of City of Heroes is beating down thugs; the developer took that basic concept and then built a game around it, resulting in gameplay that is fast and furious. When you are on a mission you rarely find a pause in the action. There’s no looting and the only reason you really ever need to slow down is to give the team thirty or so seconds to recover their stamina before you tear into the next group of baddies. Slick, is probably the best way to describe the gaming experience that is City of Heroes.
You start off by installing the game and patching it up to the current version. This is a very fast download even taking into account content update 1: Through the Looking Glass, which was released at the end of June. Once you are up to date, you pick a server and enter the character creation process. Saying that the character creation tools are “detailed” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Essentially, think up a hero, and this tool will allow you to create something that looks startlingly close to what you had in your head.
First you pick an Origin for your character, how they came to poses their powers. The origin will determine which types of items you can use to enhance your character later. The next stem is to pick an Archetype; there are five to chose from, Blaster, Controller, Defender, Scraper and Tanker. Each Archetype has a general role that it will fulfill when fighting in a team, but as you play and gain abilities you can specialize your character even more.
For instance, the Defender is generally a healing class; however automatically equating them with say, the Cleric class from other games would be incorrect because while they can heal and support the group, there are many variations in their power sets. For example, the “Dark Defender” is a fairly common sight in Paragon City. These Defenders are highly effective in combat, stripping away energy and health from your adversaries and using it to enhance your team’s combat effectiveness. The main drawback to a Defender of this sort is that their abilities are crippled when there are no enemies to draw from. The other Archetypes have room for similar specialization beyond their main role.
The next choice you need to make is for your primary power set. My Technology Blaster got himself a shiny Assault Rifle, but the other options include Fire, Ice, Electrical and Energy. Next, you get to pick a secondary power set. Since I was creating a high-tech warrior, I chose the Device power set over the elemental powers. Nothing slows down a perp’, like hitting him with a Tazer or a fist full of Caltrops.
Now that you have loosely set what your abilities are going to be you get to actually put your hero into a physical body. This is where things get cool gang. There are three body types to choose from, male, female, and huge (think the Hulk). You can adjust the height and muscle tone of each to meet just the right figure you are looking for. With that done it’s time to get yourself a look that will blow those other heroes away.
The next screen is where the magic happens. You get to design a look for your hero that will make villains quake with fear as you enter a room. I envisioned my Blaster, Michael Rainier, as a no-nonsense type and accordingly decked him out with close cropped hair, a black bandana, Heads-up Display monocle, armored boots and gloves, a flack jacket in urban camouflage with matching cargo pants, equipment bandolier and of course a utility belt (never leave home without it).
Now my guy may be sort of vanilla, but there are more options above your shoulders than most games offer for the whole character. Horns? Check. Helmets? Check. Wild hair? Check. Shades? Check. Glowing stogie? Check. Then after you pick an item you still have to choose the color and design you want on it. I spent close to two hours just tweaking my character to get just the effect I was going for.
Even cooler, now that the "Through the Looking Glass" update is out, you can unlock additional slots to create alternate costumes for your character, starting at level 20. In addition to offering a chance to create a different look, there will be even more options for your costume as you rise through the ranks.
The last thing you need to do when creating a character is give him a name, a back story and a unique battle cry that you can trigger by hitting the F10 key. The only request I would make of you is not to be a dork and just rip off some character from the popular entertainment world. I’ve seen enough Gr3y F0xs and Amazing Hu1ks to be vexed by some people’s lack of creativity.
Now you may be thinking, ‘Awesome character creation does not a great game make’ and you’re right. City of Heroes steps up with a massively helpful tutorial map that gets you familiar with virtually all of the game’s interfaces, modes and general flow. In fact I think that this may be one of the best tutorials ever in a game regardless of the genre.
After talking to a few contacts you get your first taste of crime fighting when you are asked to “apprehend” members of a rampaging street gang that are whacked out on a bad batch of drugs. Unlike those other MMOs, combat in City of Heroes is a lot more complicated than just targeting something and turning on auto attack. Every attack has to be activated each time you want to use it, whether you’re throwing a punch or emptying the clip of your assault rifle into a mob rushing you.
Everytime an attack is used it burns a portion of your endurance and you will have to wait a set amount of time before you can launch that attack again. Different attacks have different damage profiles. For instance the Slug does a heavy amount of damage at long range with a higher endurance cost and a chance to knock your target off his feet. Burst, on the other hand, doesn’t do as much damage and doesn’t have quite as long a range, but it cost’s less endurance and recharges faster.
Other attacks may not have as much range but can damage multiple foes or slow their movement speed. The thing that has always annoyed me about combat in MMOs, aside from the auto-attack thing, is that you really have to fight one enemy at a time. Even in a group it’s always a catastrophe if you end up aggro’ing more than 2 enemies. Well not in the comics and not in this game. You’ll be tearing through mobs of Hellions in no time; the frantic fighting that goes on during a bad pull in most games is what practically every battle is like in Paragon City.
The Blasters will be scorching, freezing, and generally being a general menace to anything that moves while the Controller puts the brakes on the enemy rush, does some light healing and maybe bends one of the enemies to his will and makes him attack his allies. The Tanker will be in the thick of things with the Scrapers trying to keep the villains’ attention on himself while the scrapers deal out the pain. And the Defender hangs back with the Blasters keeping everyone’s health toped off while taking the occasional pot shot at the other side. You really have to see it to appreciate it. Like I said before, the level of specialization in each class really means that there is no such thing as a perfect team composition. As long as you can dish out the damage better than you can take it you will probably be successful.
So, you have a character, you kinda know how to fight, that’s great, but what’s so great about this game? I guess it’s really the way it all fits together, the excellent concept coupled with the clean, scaleable interface, the streamlined chat system, the low lag servers and the fact that there is no need to ever just “grind levels.” There are always new missions to get, contacts to meet, plot threads to unravel.
I personally never accept a group invite to go “hunting,”; there’s simply too much to see in Paragon City to waste my time power leveling. Sure you get new powers and enhancement slots to go along with them as you level up, but XP isn’t the end all. I feel sorry for anyone who bellyaches about low experience yield. If that’s all they’re worried about they are missing a lot that is going on in this game.
When you first start out you are directed to a contact who will give you tasks to complete and introduce you to more contacts and so on so forth. Completing the story arcs for these missions yields major XP and “Influence” that can be used to buy Enhancements to improve your powers and Inspirations that offer healing and temporary stat boosts.
The only two complaints I could come up with in regards to the game itself; the lack of capes for your costume and the weak system for finding group members, are going to be fixed in the next content update at the end of September. I’m quite frankly awed at the level of competency NCSoft is displaying when it comes to supporting their product and listening to the community.
Speaking of community, like most MMOs the gamers that populate Paragon City have their good and bad points. I’ll start with the bad first. The players, in general, are incredibly impatient. I don’t know if it’s a younger average age or what, but people are in this mad dash for level 50 and, if you aren’t moving fast enough for them, they are outta there. Another thing I saw a lot of is players joining a group and as soon as their mission is done they split without doing anyone else’s. This behavior smacks of the crap you see on Xbox Live and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this is the first MMO a lot of these goombas have played.
The last gameplay issue I take with the community is the unsolicited Super Group (guild) invites I’m flooded with every time I’m anywhere there is a crowd. This is stupid; I don’t know you, I’ve never grouped with you, stop whining because I declined your unsolicited invite. Let the hate mail commence.
Now it’s not all bad by a long shot, it just seems that way some days. There is a thriving role-playing community on some of the servers. Let’s face it, RP’ing a modern character is a lot easier than a freakin’ Paladin. There are good people to play with, just make sure you add them to your friends list when you find them, and stay away from the hunting groups if you want to avoid a lot of the idiots.
Another bright spot in Paragon City is Paragon Radio. This web broadcaster has live DJs holding listener events on various servers throughout the day, and spins listener requests, rock and electronica virtually around the clock. All you need to listen is a fast internet connection and one of the popular media players.
Is City of Heroes the prettiest game on the market? No. Is that fact really important? Not really. The game looks good, crisp clean textures, believable cityscapes, and awesome special effects. The game will run relatively well on a system barely above the minimum specs without much frame rate hitching for the most part, though things will bog down when it gets crowded on screen. People with a rig built in the last few years should have no trouble running this game at fairly high settings.
The character models look really good, doubly so since you’ll never see anyone who looks exactly like you. With capes on the way and blowing hair waiting in the wings as well, things are looking good for the future. The animation also deserves some praise as well. The combat animations are well done, with bodies being hurled through the air by blasts, and Katana Scrapers whirling through dizzying strings of destruction, though I will say that the combat animation doesn’t stack well, but that’s some thing I’m pretty sure can be fixed with a patch or two. Not that such a minor thing should really be a priority for the devs.
The Emote animations in City of Heroes are totally awesome. Rare is to enter Atlas Plaza and not see groups of heroes getting funky around a boom box, or reading a paper, or standing at attention, or flexing for the ladies, or … well you get the picture. My favorite Emote though is hands down “lecture,” puts me on the floor every time.
While music is mostly absent from City of Heroes, what little there is is moody and helps to set the mood for the area you’re entering. I’m actually fine with the music not being around much, as I spent most of my time listening to Paragon Radio which, with a little more work might start sounding like a local Paragon City radio station.
The FX side of things is perfect as far as I’m concerned. Things sound exactly like you would expect, whether it’s a fire ball blasting through a mob of Vahzilok or my boot buying some Skull’s dentist a new boat. The different status effects have their own sounds associated with them, usually giving you the sense that the very air is buzzing with energy. It’s cool to say the least.
I’m going on the record as saying that City of Heroes is the best bang for your MMO buck, hands down. In what other MMO will you be walking along and have a Hellion’s flaming corpse come sailing out of the sky and slam into the street in front of you? Cryptic is already set to deliver maybe 2 more free content updates by the end of the year. The next one due out late September/early October is going to add 2 new zones, 2 new gangs, capes at level 20, a new Badge system to show everyone just how awesome you are along with loads of interface tweaks they are calling “Quality of Life” changes.
Even if you do subscribe month to month at the rate of $14.95, I feel you are buying far more entertainment than with any other game on the market, it’s that good.
Buy...this...game. It’s that simple really. City of Heroes demonstrates what I suspected for quite a while. NCSoft have their ducks in a row, and they know how to run an MMO right. Buy City of Heroes and plan on sticking around after your free month. You can have up to eight characters per server per account so there’s no excuse for not finding a power set that fits your play style like a glove.
City of Heroes is the epitome of effective game design, especially with regards to the MMO arena. If you have even the slightest interest in comic books, role-playing, MMOs, or beating on mooks, you owe it to your self to pick up City of Heroes and help safeguard the streets of fair Paragon City.