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This is going to be the short-short version. City of Heroes is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) for PC. I read one report of a few people getting COH (city of Heroes) to run on linux, so technically this isn't just limited to windows. Anyway, city of heroes is an online rpg, much like Everquest, World of Warcraft, FFXI, Star Wars Galaxies, and so on. In COH you take on the role of an aspiring super hero patrolling the streets and protecting the citizens of Paragon City. In other words, COH is a computer simulation of every goody-goody golden age comic ever written. This does not mean, however, that the tried and true is in any way boring.
Gameplay - COH is fairly well thought out. Officially, every character has an origin and an "Archetype." Origin is where your characters powers come from:
- Science - your character was standing on the wrong side of the lead shield when the reactor blew up. As if that wasn't bad enough, the safety shower was broken and your fellow scientists grabbed the bucket of glowing green stuff rather than the bucket of water to put you out.
- Mutant - you were badly sunburned as a child, and when you hit puberty you discovered you had super powers and a strange burning sensation between your toes.
- Technology - You have klepto friends in the CIA. 'Nuff said.
- Magic - After watching one too many episodes of Charmed, in an incident involving a Color-By-Number pentagram, and way too much LSD, a cross-dressed chorus line of bunnies came high kicking in and told you have magical powers. But only when you have a hang over.
- Natural - You exercise. A lot.
As far as actually gameplay goes, origin has minimal impact. The real factor is what type of archetype you choose.
- Blaster - You are a glass cannon. You can lay the smackdown to foes near and far. Unfortunately you are like Samuel Jackson in Unbreakable, and have a bad penchant for easily broken bones.
- Controller - These guys are just weird. Controllers have great power, but can't do direct damage to anything to save their lives. On the bright side, however, you get Gaijin Jedi powers, including mind control, force choke, and the cool Darth Vader attack where you pick up nearby small objects (rocks, trees, little old ladies, and Buicks) and hurl them into your enemy's face.
- Defender - Jack of all trades. Defenders get Buffing and De-buffing powers (Wax on. Wax off.) You can also chose ranged attacks, Emission attacks (no, not farting) and storm summoning. You can give and receive moderate damage.
- Scrapper - you get to be The Rock, and lay the Smackdown. You also get cool support powers like regeneration or kung-fu-quick super reflexes.
- Tanker - you do your best imitate an M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. Unfortunately for evil doers, you do a surprisingly good imitation.
Ok, so you pick your origin, and you pick your archetype. Then you get to pick powers. Each archetype gets a primary power pool and a secondary power pool. There are 5 different pools to choose from for each main power set and secondary power set, and each pool has 10 powers. (You get to choose 2 sets consisting of 10 powers) You start off with just 2 powers from the sets you choose, but as you get more experience you develop new powers. Additionally, there are about 12 "generic" power pools of 4 powers each. In other words, there is no shortage of powers. Later, you can even customize your powers further by enhancing a power you have to make it more effective.
If you think you have a lot of choices already, you are wrong. The last thing you get to choose for your character is your costume. The developers went out of their way to make as many different costumes as possible. You get to choose everything from hats, masks, tops, arms, legs, hair, boots, belts, and booty. The developers have calculated that with the criteria of at least 3 things being different between every costume, there are several million unique combinations. And in an update coming soon, they are adding yet more costume pieces. The costume system alone has gotten COH some awards. And yes, if you feel so inclined, you can even mimic existing comic characters, and thanks to the recent lawsuit of Marvel vs. COH, it's even legal.
Ok, so, you got your origin, your archetype, your power sets, your costume, and your cool crime-fighting name. Now its time to play. You can choose to have a first or third person view. Your powers are represented as icons in a tray in the bottom corner of the screen. You move about using "WASD" and you use your mouse to steer and look about. You click on a target to select it, then either click a power icon, or hit a number key (0-9) to use the selected power on the selected target. Got it? Nice and simple. Paragon city has lots of heroes (must be something in the water) and as such, has a well established system to protect the younger heroes. The city is divided into zones, and each zone has a required security level. As you gain more levels, your security level goes up, and you can go into more dangerous areas. Some areas are so dangerous that only a team of superheroes working together can hope to survive. As a hero, you gain levels by killing bad guys (I think you kill them at least… I HOPE you kill them. Arresting them just sounds lame). You also have Contacts that will pass you tips about bigger things going on (plot!). These contacts will give you missions to accomplish, as well as introducing you to other contacts.
I'm running short on time now, so I'm just going to abort this review here, at the halfway point.
Final Notes:
- COH requires a lot of co-operative play to get stuff done, though soloing is possible.
- COH currently has no PVP, but they are introducing consensual PVP in the next big patch.
- COH has semi-regular Major updates that add news powers, features, costumes, etc.
Finally, almost all powers in COH have spiffy animations, so there is always lots of cool stuff to watch.
If you want more information, email me. I also play on the Guardian server. My global chat name is Stalking Horse (not sure if I have global chat turned on. My characters are Stalking Horse, Armistice, and Nuance (I generally play Armistice).
Gameplay - See above.
Plot - plot is driven only by missions and talking to contacts. Its easy to gloss over it entirely. On the other hand, this is an MMO game, so people don't exactly play it for the game driven plot anyway.
Graphics - graphics are well tuned for a variety of graphics cards. There are several sliders, and you can just adjust them to where you get the best performance/quality for your specific computer and graphics card. Additionally there are a lot of good looking flashy animations for most powers.
Connection - this game is perfectly playable on a modem. While you are playing performance will be fine; it will just take longer to load between areas and missions.
Difficulty - the game has good difficulty that adjusts well to who is on a team and at what level. Additional you can "sidekick" lower level character so they can play effectively with higher levels. Additionally, higher levels can "exemplar" down to play effectively with lower levels. Finally, you can set your difficulty in game for how hard the base difficulty of a mission is, if things seem too easy.
Sound - The sound quality is quite decent. I don't find the sound effects annoying, and some of the music is even catchy. I generally keep the game sound turned down a little low, so I can use teamspeak (a voice chat program; I talk to Sidra when we play together. It's a lot faster and easier than typing) at the same time.
Spiff Factor - almost everything in the game has a command line way to invoke it. Its like using unix/linux. It's a great way to quickly do some stuff without having to navigate menus. More programs should have these. Also the flashy animations get points. Finally, the costume creation system is freaking cool. Over time, your character can have up to 4 different costumes, and even then you can still alter them (for a price) to completely change them.
Well, that's it for now.
--zack
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