Heroes don't change weapons or armors. That's right. Superman will always wear his underwear outside, and Spiderman will never wear a cloak either. These appearances make each Hero unique. And thus players of City of Heroes have oh-so-many options to create their Characters. There are many faces, hair styles, and Details (glasses, Rebreather, Gas Mask, ear pieces, and many more) to choose from, so that your character won't run into his or her clone. You also have the freedom to choose the clothing of your character. You want a jacket? A high school shirt? Skirt or Shorts? Very long or very tight pants? All these are possibilities of making your character appealing to you. You can even make a naked Hero, if you want to... Apart from all clothing options, you can also set the Scale of the body parts too: short or long legs; small or wide shoulders and hips; flat or huge chest/breasts; and the height of character (Be warned though, many times you fight enemies in small areas. Controlling a tall character in a small cave = bad camera angle/movement).

But the process of character creation doesn't just involve appearance, it also determines what kind of Powers your character are going to have. There are a few Archetypes to choose from, and each has access to different kind of Powersets. Tanker and Scrapper focus on Defense and Melee powers, while Blaster, Defender and Controller focus on Range, Support, Buff powers and such. Each powerset also offer many possibilities. For example, Melee powerset lets you choose what kind of weapon your character is going to use: Dual Wield swords, Great Sword, Katana, Dark or Fiery Melee (fists and punches). Defense powerset allows you to pick what kind of defense power you want, such as Fiery Aura, Stone Armor, Ice Armor, Dark Armor and such. Later on, as you advance in levels, you will be able to learn new power from your powersets you choose. (From Fiery Aura powerset; Fire Shield increases resistance, Fire Blaze deals small damage to all enemies nearby, while Healing Flame recovers your Health Points. i.e.)

At level 6 and higher, your character also has access to new powerpool. These are universal to all Archetypes. These new powerpools also give the path to Travel Powers, available at level 14: Superspeed, Superjump, Teleport, Fly and so on. Some of these powerpools give additional attack powers, or increase Regeneration or Recovery rate. To simply put, a player can try out lots of Archetypes and builds just for fun, or to learn how other classes play. Replayability has never been better.

Most quests (called Missions, or mish) are carried out in Instances, which are scaled by your level when you pick them up, by number of players in the team, and by Difficulty Rate which you can change in-game. Usually the team leader picks a mission from Contacts (mission givers) or from radio (main stream of missions) and everyone will share the same mission. Many missions involve killing all enemies in the instance, in many cases you have to retrieve objects, escort an NPC, or defeat a boss.

Now that I mention Mission, it's only fair for me to talk about the Architect Entertainment. To simply put, AE is the User-Generated Content (missions) from players to players for players. You can now design your own missions and story that comes with it. The bad? It seems many AE missions are a spoil to players. Fewer and fewer players do the real missions these days. Everyone just hang around in the Architect Entertainment building, and do those AE missions instead. Imagine you play a game that you don't have to run around and explore the world and get to learn each town name. You instead just stay in an instance created for your team, and just keep killing monsters that keep coming. You level fast in this game if you have good team and team members. But you can't get good team if everyone else isn't interested in doing normal missions with you.

There are many servers for this game. But unfortunately most are left with about 1/3 players of the server capability, with only a few that have about 2/3 players before the server is full. Merging low population servers together might be a good idea. That way players can easier find players to team up with, for both AE and normal missions.

Apart from all else, City of Heroes has auction system, crafting system (for power upgrades, costumes, and such), homebase for Supergroup (guild) and more.

Reviewed Jun 09

RATING