City of Heroes/Villains

Criminals beware, boiled-sweet man is here!

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City of Heroes has been a source of much amusement in our house lately, mostly at my expense I should add and personally I blame it's rather wonderful character creation tool. My square-jawed clean cut bastion of justice was intended to be an imposing figure, his broad powerful chest and muscular physique seemed to me to be everything a superhero should be. I'd tweaked and tuned his every attribute till he appeared to be near perfect, the game even let me arm him with a set of cool Wolverine-esque claws as the icing on an already impressive cake. So, when he finally stepped out onto the streets of Paragon City a sense of justified pride in my creation swelled in my heart. It didn't last long however, I was soon brought crashing back to reality by a stifled giggle from the other side of the room as my girlfriend watched my baby take his first steps. "Red and white spandex? He looks like a boiled sweet!"

Bugger!

Since then I've had to put up with cruel taunts about my hero's appearance on a regular basis, taunts that cut all the deeper because minutes after his birth he was joined on the street by my girlfriend's far cooler looking effort. Slim and sexy in a black and purple leather getup that wouldn't look out of place in an S&M club (yes, I wondered where she got her ideas from too...) and boasting a funky range of fire and ice based attacks she looked far more suited to the job of modern crime fighting than my own brightly coloured shiny spandex clad offering. Ridicule suffering aside, the fact that two so diverse characters can come out of the creation process is actually the first thing that impresses when you load up City of Heroes for the first time, unlike your really rather limited character creation options in World Of Warcraft and many other MMO's here you're given huge freedom over every itty little bit of your character's physical appearance, fantastic as no-one wants to battle crime looking naff. Unless you're me it would seem.

With City of Heroes and City of Villains now almost three and two years old respectively it's perhaps a strange time to be giving these already firmly established MMO's the review treatment, but with the recent release of the latest free update, issue 9, now seems as good a time as any to re-assess them and see how they hold up in today's significantly more crowded MMO marketplace. To cement their already obvious links both games now come in the same single DVD pack and your subscription fee covers both titles effectively giving you two games for your money, albeit two games cut from very similar cloth. For the uninitiated, and as their names suggest, both titles centre around taking your created hero or villain and trying to either protect or rule the streets of Paragon City depending on which one you're playing. It's a simple yet fundamentally brilliant idea for an MMO that holds up now just as well as it did at launch. It's also unashamedly fun, stripped of some of the more complex MMO features it gives a much purer experience for those fresh to the genre or anyone jaded by the serious complexity of other titles. By concentrating solely on the bits people who want to play superhero games are most interested in, namely superpowers and character abilities, rather than any of the more involved economics of other MMOs, COH/V manages to deliver a pair of finely focused games that understand what their audience wants and aren't ashamed to provide it by the bucket load.

For all its more streamlined MMO appeal actually settling down to play reveals a fundamental structure as standard as they come, wandering the city making contacts and accepting missions from them forms the core experience much like any other modern role-playing game you care to mention. Those missions tend to either send you off to defeat a set number of bad guys or ask you to enter a private 'instanced' location to complete a series of set objectives (generally variations on defeat all the bad guys and find some clues or destroy/protect something), as you get more experienced you get introduced to new contacts in new parts of the city who offer more challenging missions to keep you busy and so it continues as you move through the levels. It's not all about just missions though; your more every day crime fighting plays a large part too. Paragon City's streets are rife with crime, from muggings and car jacking to attempted breaking and entering; you're never far from some nefarious deed or other so it's up to you to help clean things up by apprehending the criminals when you spot them. It's here that Cryptic Studios have done something startlingly obvious yet very clever at the same time. In a world where every MMO creator is trying to come up with a novel way of making the repetitive XP grind less, well, grinding, COH/V has been doing just that for years. Fighting random street crime to gain some extra EX may well be no different in principle to killing the numerous beasts that roam the lands of other MMO's for the same reason but there's something far more immersive and 'in character' about a superhero saving an endangered civilian from a gang of thugs than there is slaughtering a pack of nondescript wolves time and time again, especially when the newly saved citizen happily thanks you and proclaims how great you are to anyone in the vicinity. Glory! It's what every Superhero wants secretly!

Of course all of this work to gain EX and move through the levels wouldn't be worth the effort without some rewards and here again COH/V's raw subject matter provides it with a wealth of possibilities, almost every superpower you can dream of is available in one way or another and all can be improved and built upon to create any kind character you want. The more you level up the more powers you have to choose from and each of those can be augmented by the addition of various enhancements that you pickup or purchase during the game. These enhancements can be locked into a powers upgrade slots and combined to improve it in any number of ways, from faster recharging and improved accuracy to improving their potency. You also regularly acquire inspirations which provide temporary upgrades such as improved luck, rage and health boosts. Once you get past the first few levels the game starts to gradually open up more powers and enhancement slots giving you a real feeling of growth, as you'd expect one of the most exciting of those powers to be learnt is flight, you feel far more superhero-like when you can do the whole 'Is it a bird? Is it a plane?' thing.

This being a multiplayer game there's no shortage of ways to interact with your fellow heroes and villains, not only can you team up for some missions as you'd expect in any MMO but you can also band together more permanently by forming super groups al la The Avengers and The Justice League (similar to guilds in certain other games). There's also a well thought out sidekick option where a more powerful character can temporarily improve the stats of a friend allowing them to adventure together on a more equal footing. Of course, a world setup with such naturally opposing forces wouldn't be complete without some PvP action too and this is provided in various arenas dotted around the city.