City Of Villains & City Of Heroes: Good vs Evil Combined Edition

I've now played this game twice, in effect; once when City of Heroes was new, and then again when City of Villains came onto the scene.

Both times I enjoyed myself immensely, but as you can see above, there are down points.

However, let's start with the good. Creating your super hero is excellent fun, and with all the permutations available it's not hard to create a genuinely unique-looking outfit. The relative lack of detailed face and body modelling (which works so well in the criminally under-played Everquest 2) is a monir quibble in the face of this. After all, it's the costume that most defines a super hero!

Also, the game is fairly simple to get into and learn to use. It's not completely intuitive, but any MMO game is going to have a necessarily higher level of complexity, and this game does an admirable job of drawing in new players gently.

Looks and sound wise, it hits all the spots. There's an over-riding comicbook feel that perfectly suplements the theme, and it simply feels RIGHT.

However, there are problems. Chief among them is depth, or rather a serious lack thereof. An MMOG is designed to be played for months persistently (hence the month subscription fee, which I personally have no problem with; no single player games has near the level of content and support that an MMOG has), and persistent play requires a constantly evolving learning curve and rewards scheme. City of Heroes/Villains lacks this:

Basically, along with a health increase, going up a level here allows you to pick a new power (every other level), or a new upgrade slot for an existing power (the levels in between). Different character classes simply have different power sets to choose from.

So, you head out into the city and beat up good people (if you're a villain) or bad people (if you're a hero) at the behest of quest givers. They then send you to a new quest giver, who tells you to go and beat some more people up. In between, if you're game, you can beat people up for experience and fun...

And that's ALL you do. It's fun while it lasts, but after a month or so it becomes a tiresome, incredibly monotonous experience.

In summary, if you mant a game to introduce you to the realm of the "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game", then this is a good start because it's so simple and easy to get into. Unfortunately, you'll soon find yourself wondering why you play it and looking for something with a little more depth and complexity, for basically the same reasons.

So! Have a go and have fun; create some hilarious super heros/villains, beat people up, then move on...

As the title says, I've tried a good many mainstream and otherwise MMORPG's that are available at present and others which have been retired. As far as the current generation goes City of Heroes/Villains is the only one I am happy to pay a subscription fee for (having also played WoW, SW:G, EQ/EQ2 etc. but ultimately deeming them poor in comparison) and at £8.99 per month on the monthly billing cycle for access to both games it's quite affordable by comparison too. The Good vs. Evil Combined Edition gives you access to both sides and all the bonus content straight out of the box. (Note that City of Heroes and City of Villains use exactly the same client, so you don't need to install them separately if you already own one, if you're patched up to date you already have the client for both games, it's just the serial keys activated on your account that give access to each side)

It's a welcome break from the norm', seeing as most of the genre these days falls into two categories: Fantasy or Sci-Fi, and are pretty much always a case of Elves or Aliens with no fresh content or direction. Whilst CoX still falls under the Fantasy category it *is* fresh, you take on the role of a hero or villain (or both) and have a massive world in which to play out your character's career, the whole game is deliberately very comic-book like with various plots that develop over the course of missions in the shape of story arcs, beautiful architecture and settings, and a whole host of interesting hero/villain factions to take on or assist and unravel the origins of.

The character creation process, as has already been mentioned, is *the* most in-depth and customisable of *any* MMORPG to date and the competition doesn't even come close to the level of depth; you can quite easily spend an hour or more designing your character before you even get in to the game. The animations are smooth and fittingly dynamic, making you really feel like a superhero (or villain) as you go about your duty in the game world, and with huge content updates named "Issues" (see their website for details, click "archives to browse through older Issue updates) constantly adding new areas, powers, costume pieces and such there is always something new and interesting to try out. We've just had Issue 9: Breakthrough and it's "Invention System" added, and we've literally just been given the announcement of Issue 10: Invasion coming soon. I really couldn't be happier with my choice to remain an active subscriber to the game.

I've been an avid city of heroes/villains player for a long while now, (coming up on 15 months veteran) and am still enjoying the game every bit as much as the first day i unwrapped the game and put it in my disc drive.

City of Heroes Lets players create their ultimate hero and defend Paragon city from all sorts of nasties, Including enemies such as the deadly Arachnos army, and the twisted Carnival of Shadows. Villains allows a player to create a dark villian, who will start his or her life being broken out of jail and continue to wreak havoc on the villian infested rogue isles.

Heroes and Villians can cross over into PvP zones, Do missions, Go on task/Strike forces (long missions ranging anything from 1-10 hours or more) Or just sit back and enjoy random instances through the innovative 'Newspaper or police band radio scanner' missions. Which spawn random maps of a particular enemy group.

Several new features have come to the game recently including the invention system which lets players craft enhancements for the powers. There has also been the application of time travel allowing players to travel back and complete story arcs they have missed. Along with time travel zones set in the ancient past have been added. Most recently a ancient roman zone called 'Cimerora'. Updates for the game come in 'Issue's' which are regular enough to keep hardcore gamers busy. Some issue's also come with world events, Like the Rikti invasion. Which saw an alien attack on Paragon city and the rogue isles. To launch the Rikti warzone, A co-operative area where villains and heroes can work together. The sidekick system also lets players of different levels to team together for joint gain.

Before i finish this review i'd like to say, for those who like customisation, look no further, CoH/CoV offer UNRIVALED customisation, you pick exactly how your character looks from a selection of litterally thousands of costume parts and colour's. With new parts been added every update. As well as your costume you are not set into the role of the typical mage/warrior etc who all have the same powers. Instead each archetype (A class as such) has a selection of primary powersets, secondary powersets, Power pools(things like flight and teleportation) and epic powersets, Which enable you to customise your characters powers to get the hero or villain you've always wanted. And when you hit 50 on your first character you unlock epic archetypes! which are powersets you have not had access too. (I would like to note, these epic archetypes are not unbalanced, so you won't be outplayed by a person with an epic just because they are epic.)

All in all GET THIS GAME :P

thats my extensive review. hope it helps.

Well I've just finished a 14 day trial of both games, and I have to say I'm blown away with how much fun this game is. Having played World of Warcraft since shortly after release at all levels of gameplay, I find the one major difference between both experiences is that I invariably come away from City of Heroes/Villains feeling that I've had fun, rather than simply endured a time sink designed to line some corporate vampires pockets. The character generation is nothing short of brilliant, the missions although a little repetitive and the gameplay perhaps lacking a little in complexity in comparison to Warcraft seems far more immediately rewarding. Add to this the ability to change your difficulty setting, or take more people to a mission, knowing the instance will increase the enemies accordingly, and you have plenty of ways to play the game depending on your mood. This makes the game far more suitable to those who don't always want to have to hang around for 3 hours trying to find collect right balance of player classes, only to find one or more of those players have social issues or are blinded by their own egos. The game still has its fair share of arrogants but they are far less pervasive than those that seem to infest the WoW the community, overall Ive had a much more pleasant experience with this game.

The Invention System gives you the capacity to expand and improve your character in your own way, the base system is relatively intuitive and has a good selection of tilesets and objects to give it the feel you want.

The only thing I should point out is that the play.com synopsis above claims Villains players will play in Paragon city. This is incorrect, Villains players will play through the Rogue Isles either assisting Arachnos in consolidating their power, or working independantly. However, there are PvP battlegrounds that bring heroes and villains together in combat.

Anyway, after playing the trial I'm very tempted to buy the full game and wouldn't feel ripped off in the slightest by the monthly fees.

Quite simply the best MMO (massively multiplayer Online) game out there.
The character creation is head and shoulders above anything else with well over a million costume combinations to choose from at the outset.
A consistant, believable and engrossing world environment.
If you've played and grown bored with WoW and the like (and to be fair, who wouldn't) give this a try.. it really is a gem!
See you in the City.