Reviewed: December 27, 2005
Reviewed by: Jason Porter
Publisher
NCsoft
Developer
Cryptic Studios
Released: October 31, 2005
Genre: MMORPG
Players: Online
ESRB: Teen
8
8
7
10
8.2
System Requirements
Recommended System
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
MMO’s come and MMO’s go. Despite some surprise successes over the last year or two (would you believe there were analysts predicting that World of Warcraft would crash and burn when it launched in November 2004?), most games in the genre, for whatever reason, appear like a dust mote in the eye and are gone in a blink. Remember The Saga of Ryzom? How about Risk Your Life: Path of the Emperor? No? Well, here's one for you then: City of Heroes.
NCsoft's wildly popular superhero MMO has just the right mix of extensive cosmetic customization, streamlined gameplay (VERY streamlined) and a market appeal that's not quite niche, but not quite mainstream. Hailed as an innovative step forward in the MMO world, the game features neither equipment nor trade skills, instead leaving everything to the inherently awesome powers of the super-charged crime fighter’s player’s control. Only focusing on combat makes CoH a great game to just sit down and play for half an hour in between work and school, and a lot of nice little touches and extras (such as the ability to write your character's own backstory for all to see) give it appeal to the more dedicated MMO player base.
On the flip side, the game's excessive focus on combat can make it difficult to really sit down and play for long, as the endless fights begin to get repetitive and the lack of anything else to do makes itself painfully obvious.
The game's biggest draw, overall, has always been its character creator, a setup with so much flexibility it's impossible to ever run into anyone who looks exactly like you do. And in NCsoft's release of City of Villains, the long-anticipated sister game to City of Heroes, the creator has been left intact - but with hundreds of new "evil" options, such as skull belts and hoofed feet. That alone will make it worth the purchase to almost anyone who knows what the creator is capable of. But does the game address the weaknesses of its predecessor, or is it just an uncommonly extensive expansion to the original?
On the down side, if you've played City of Heroes, you know exactly - EXACTLY - what to expect when you first fire up City of Villains. On the up side, if you've played City of Heroes, you know exactly - EXACTLY - what to expect when you first fire up City of Villains. Controls, camera movement, quick bars, inspirations, contacts and enhancements - the things that make the original so much fun are all here in force. Also here is the marked lack of anything to do besides fight. But at least this time, you get to beat up on the good guys, right?
Well... not always. The first fifteen or so levels of play have your villainous alter ego involved in faction wars all over the Rogue Isles (where the game is based) more than any real trouncing of the forces of Truth and Justice. Occasionally, you'll get the chance to go after the good guys - earned bank robbery "missions," which become a familiar sight after a while, pit your wickedness against an endless stream of security guards, for example - but by and large, this is Godfather-type stuff.
Prove yourself to factions by eradicating members of other factions, help out the exiled (and entertainingly named) Vendetti family get revenge on their former "business associates," and generally make more trouble for your own side than the opposition by looking out for Number One and playing both sides against the middle whenever possible. It sounds cool in theory, but in practice, I found myself wondering when I was going to get to knock some more heroic heads, if ever. According to people online, there is a definite shift towards fighting against the caped fools of Paragon City after about the 20th level, so that's good at any rate.
We've established that the gameplay and mission structures are largely the same as those in CoH, and that you don't get to do a lot of good-guy whacking right off the bat, to boot. So what are the compelling reasons to buy this game? There are quite a few, actually, but the biggest draw for most people is going to be the inclusion of five all-new character classes not seen in City of Heroes. A couple of them, like the Corruptor, roughly match up with a similar archetype on CoH (in this instance, the Blaster).
However, even such similar classes have large enough differences between them to make them worth trying - that Corruptor, while primarily a ranged damage dealer like the Blaster, also possesses a strong suite of group buff effects. Brutes are the standard "me smash" type of fighter, but they also have an anger rating during battle that can increase their power during a protracted fight (and are a bit lighter on defense than CoH's Tanker class). Dominators, similar to Controllers, have mind control powers and are invaluable in groups. And the last two classes, Stalker and Mastermind, are unbelievably cool and represent larger departures from CoH than the others.
The Stalker, a stealth combatant, matches up roughly with World of Warcraft's Rogue class, a sort of Scrapper with lower defenses and more interesting powers. Stalkers are able to hide indefinitely, with no speed or ability handicap (!), moving completely unseen by enemies within a few levels of their own. When they come out of hiding with a combat move, that move is almost always guaranteed to be a critical strike - or more. And after a few seconds out of combat, they slip back into the shadows again automatically.
My main character while testing this game was a Stalker, and with certain special moves and a bit of planning, I watched many a boss enemy drop like a stone in one or two strikes, without any help from another player. And the hiding ability of a Stalker is so effective, I would often collect an important item from an enemy base for a mission - and find that since I hadn't killed a single enemy the entire time, the mission hadn't yet ended! I then had to hang around picking off targets until the familiar words "MISSION COMPLETE!" flashed on to the screen.
The Mastermind, on the other hand, starts out slowly but can eventually become a devastating one-man army, commanding up to six loyal and thoroughly expendable henchmen to do his dirty work for him. There's a bit of megalomaniac in all of us, and the Mastermind archetype gives a vent to those dark dreams. NCsoft, a company widely known for its great fan service, knew exactly what they were doing when they designed it, too: players can choose from being able to control ninjas, zombies, combat robots or military commandos when designing their MM (as the class is known in the CoV community).
Each type has its strengths and weaknesses - the mercenary troops are primarily ranged attackers, while zombies can take a lot of damage but are slow - and three different units to unlock as ranks of skill are attained. Starting out being able to command one low-level baddie, players will eventually be able to command three of them, two midlevels, and one mightily powerful servant. The trade-off for all this coolness is that the Master himself doesn't get to do a whole lot besides support his grunts. A few weak ranged attacks and some movement restricting gizmos round out the class' repertoire.
In addition to all the new class goodness and extra cosmetic components the game has to offer, there's a new and wonderful way City of Villains has to offer players a steady stream of missions - without a lot of boring travel from point to point. That method is the newspaper. It makes perfect sense, right? You're the villain, so of course you flip through the paper and see what needs villainizing. I call it the "Two-Face" method of mission procurement - "two million dollars delivered in two armored cars to the Cocteau Twins? Sounds like a hijacking to me!" Yes, I am an old school Detective Comics geek. Thank you, thank you.
At any given time, there'll be three different missions to find in the paper. Maybe some rival criminal has been slandering your bad name and it's time to teach him a lesson. Maybe there's been a kidnapping, with a hefty ransom note, off of which you could profit by kidnapping from the kidnappers. Or maybe there's a stolen artifact that could make you rich - and now that some other mook's done all the work, you're ready to swing by and collect on the payoff. You can whip the paper out at any time, any place, and grab a mission for some extra experience and Infamy (the game's currency, functionally identical to Influence in CoH). Completing five of these randomly generated missions will also snag you a bonus Bank Robbery mission, in which you fight your way through a sea of security guards, bash open the bank vault and waltz out with the money in tow. The guards continually respawn, so if you're looking to grind levels up quickly, these are a great opportunity to do so.
Of course, without some sort of player versus player aspect, some of the oomph of playing the bad guy would be gone. City of Villains offers new and extensive PvP options for the players who are interested in engaging in such activities. As opposed to traditional MMORPG’s such as World of Warcraft, PvP isn't decided by server; rather, it's divided up into three different types of combat available to all players (of sufficient level to reach them) on every server.
First and foremost, the Arena combat of CoH is alive and well, allowing villains to pit themselves against each other one-on-one. Second, and perhaps most exciting, is the addition of three (possibly four, according to the rulebook) specially designated PvP zones - available to players from both games. That's right, since the servers are identical on each game, you can actually take your bad guy and go meet the do-gooders playing City of Heroes next door in mortal combat. It's intense and fast, but it can be deliriously fun as well. It's an excellent way to inject some excitement back into a game that can become very repetitive.
There is also the opportunity for a group of super villains to raid an enemy base en masse - the customizable super bases found in City of Heroes make an appearance here, as well. Once your group's base has acquired an Item of Power (a particularly powerful or important artifact), it's open season on your base for any other group that decides to assault it. There are a number of rules governing the when and how of this type of combat, but since I wasn't in a super group I didn't get to see much of it.
Is City of Villains an actual game in its own right? Yes, since it can stand on its own and be played entirely independent of City of Heroes. Is it similar to that title? Yes, extremely similar. Chances are that if you've become bored with the older game, the newer game won't hold your attention for very long. The underlying systems all remain the same - you level up and acquire new abilities in the same way and at the same pace, you acquire enhancements to your abilities and combine them in kind, and so on.
However, the PvP combat might be just the dose of adrenaline some players need to start having real fun with it again - it's complicated, exciting and never the same twice. For those of you who still enjoy City of Heroes, there's a smorgasbord of goodies awaiting you in CoV - new classes and the wonderfully elegant newspaper mission system are big standouts, but it's also fun just to switch gears and watch overdramatic villainous posturing, instead of overdramatic heroic posturing, for a change.
The really important thing to note here isn't so much the raw quality of the graphics as it is the unending flexibility of the character creation system. There are equal resources in it to create a fearsome hooded demon who causes the dead to rise from the earth and devour their loved ones, as there is to make a poorly coordinated fool of a man with bright yellow skin, flight goggles and a purple jumpsuit who goes by the unsettling moniker of Pee Lad.
Although much of the available selections are identical to those found in City of Heroes, there are scores and scores of new additions that will keep most people entertained for weeks. Half the fun of the City of... games is designing something completely original and then flaunting it to the rest of the world. City of Villains carries that torch admirably.
Of course, with any MMO (and any computer game in general), a lot of the graphics have to do with A) the speed of your internet connection and B) the power of your graphics card. While I have a blisteringly fast connection, I must admit that my card is... shall we say, a bit on the cheap side. With the graphics maxed out (I am lucky enough to have a friend with a very nice computer who also plays CoV for this comparison), the level of detail doesn't change so much as the smoothness of that detail. Hair and eyes become less jagged, hands look more natural and so forth.
What's much more noticeable is the clarity and polish of the special effects. Glare reflecting off of a shiny piece of equipment is rendered much more convincingly, and energy blasts have more visual noise to them. However, even on my PC with its flat-average specifications, this game looks very good. NCsoft has done a great job rendering things down for lower quality graphics cards without giving up the look and feel of the game as a whole. Draw distances are always more than acceptable on my computer, although they too can be better, and weather effects (such as they are) are convincing.
Rather than put a lot of voice acting into City of Villains, the developers opted to continue in City of Heroes' vein and have everything said display in a comic book-style word bubble above players' heads. The usual chat log is there to keep track of anything you might miss while your back is turned. Mission-providing NPC’s speak in the same way as always, through a block of text displayed on a pop-up screen. Even performing the Laugh emote doesn't elicit any sort of a sound from your villain's lips (or whatever those are). While a small amount of voice work (such as in the instance of Laughing) would have been nice, I have to say I like the silent method as well. It keeps the game feeling more like a comic book.
The vast majority of the game's sounds come in the form of sound effects. Although there are many sounds recycled from CoH, there are also plenty of new noises to delight and entertain. Whoever NCsoft has mixing up sounds for them does an awesome, awesome job of making everything sound the way it ought to. It's so good that when you hear something that sounds different than what you thought it was going to sound like, you'll always end up realizing that the game's got it down after all. Jet packs, super-speed running, even the occasional satellite-guided ballistic missile strike - all the sounds in City of Villains not only meet the standard, but go far beyond it.
The music in this game is also very good, but it doesn't stand out as much as it could. The opening game screens have a nice, ominous-sounding theme to set the mood. During play, the music (similar to CoH again) is mostly electronic stuff, with fast beats and synthesized sounds layered on top. It generally fits the setting pretty well, but it never comes close to setting a mood the way the music of an EverQuest or a World of Warcraft can.
Of course, any MMO can give you, the player, as much return as the effort and time you invest in it. As long as the company continues to support it, there will always be another villain to create, as well as regular patch updates and someday, perhaps expansion sets as well. But stacking City of Villains up against the competition reveals it to be a game of extraordinary value, even among MMO’s. Firstly, there's the character creator, which is so much fun it could almost be a game in and of itself. Secondly, and most importantly for players of City of Heroes, NCsoft allows both games to be played on one account, meaning after the initial purchase, your $15 a month will get you online with not one, but two entertaining games. Never mind their similarities - $7.50 per month, per game is one of the best MMO deals I've ever seen.
The villain community is also something worth noting. By and large, I found that the motley crew on my server was hands-down some of the nicest bad guys I'd ever had the pleasure to play with. It's quite common for high-level players to congregate near starting areas and hold costume competitions for Infamy among the lower-levels. In fact, I won 100,000 Infamy at level two through just such a contest. At level thirty, that kind of money is complete chump change. But at two, it was a godsend, and paid for everything I needed for the next fifteen levels.
Due to the flexible, casual feel of gameplay, it's also very easy to find a group or at least a partner if you're having trouble with a mission. And thankfully, l33t-speak and petty one-upmanship seem to be at a minimum. The avatar of a villain allows players to vent frustrations with each other while staying in character, and it's often so entertaining to watch that neither of them will argue for long.
Between a comfortable community, opportunities for PvP combat, and the endless fun of creating a new character, City of Villains is solidly at the top of the value game. Offering a monthly fee twofer with City of Heroes only sweetens the deal. City of Villains is one of the best MMO values on the market today.
It's good to be bad. That's the core idea behind City of Villains, and although it doesn't let you be as wicked as you might like to be, it remains a very good game. You'll still have to turn to games like Grand Theft Auto and Rampage if you want to shake down hapless citizens on the street for cash, but this game is a step in the right (wrong?) direction. The graphics are well-scaled, and the sound effects, as well as dialog bubbles, help the game to really feel like a comic book come to life at times.
The solid gameplay found in City of Heroes hasn't changed much for its trip to the Rogue Isles, but new classes ease the similarities. Strong PvP aspects add a lot of extra value to the game - if you don't mind getting yanked left and right from time to time. And the newspaper mission procurement system is pure genius. Although it doesn't fix all of the problems City of Heroes had, City of Villains definitely puts a fresh new spin on the formula. It's a good choice for both casual and dedicated gamers, and should provide most people with entertainment for months, if not years, to come.