City of Heroes Preview
Previews

I don't think any of us that were born in the last Century haven't read at least one type of Comic Book in our childhood, or even as adult. Comics have been one of the few constants during the past decades. Where other trends were born and vanished in the same month, Comics persist. Comics are an easy way for any artist to tell a story, they've been used in a wide variety of Games like for example Max Payne 1&2 to tell the story alongside with cut scenes. It is no marvel (yes, this is not just the worlds most famous Comic manufacturer, but also an English word) that there have been countless attempts to create a world inside our very own silicon driven wonder works of modern technology that let us live the freedom we could only read about in Comics so far. Almost every Marvel Comic Character has been recreated as polygon model, ready to serve the freedom and justice, steered by the hands of us avid computer gamers. Superman, Batman and Spiderman are most popular ones.

But how about ôThe Blazing Cockroachö and ôHank the Squirrelö or any other Super Hero that has never made it's debut in a Comic Book? The heroes that have only existed in our own mind so far? They've never made it into a polygon form û until now.

City of Heroes is what will breath life into ôVacuum Vinceö and ôWindy Cindyö. Cryptic Studios and NCSoft make it possible for you to live your dreams in Paragon City. And the best of it all (and reason why you are reading it at MMO Gamer's Hell) is: it's massively multiplayer! You're not hunting the venomous villains yourself, you join a fight that is being fought by thousands of players concurrently online.

Character creation revolutionized.

When I first launched up the City of Heroes Beta Client I haven't read up on the game very much, and so I couldn't possibly imagine the vast character customization options that I was presented. The literally thousands of possible combinations made the creation of ôFyrn Hellfireö very pleasant. The fire fanatic I am, I chose a selection of strong armor and a fiery theme dominated by the colors black and red. The fact you can customize everything, from head to feet right in the beginning effectively eliminates the endless search for loot that will be good for your in terms of defense and look. You just instantly create the look you can identify yourself with. Imagine Superman flying around in a green jogging suit before he finally got level 10 and had enough cash to buy his cape, it would be ridiculous.

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So here I was, a newly appointed Super Hero on my way to Galaxy City, where I would start to serve the freedom and peace. Wrapped in my enormous armor, ready to set the foes ablaze.

I think I lost the learning curve.

In City of Heroes there is near to no learning curve. You start off in a tutorial that guides you through the basic tricks within maybe 10 minutes, letting you fight your first enemies, do your first mission, and learn the basic keys and interface. Even without this tutorial I don't think I would've taken more than 10 minutes to figure it out. There are only a handful of keys you really need throughout the game and you can fully configure them to your liking.

The never ending story of repetitive combat.

Fighting for the freedom of Paragon City can be a boring task at times. The fact that your enemies aren't Boars and Maggots who crawl around inanely in newbie areas, but villains under the influence of a drug that mug and molest citizens both physically and verbally makes the whole thing a tad more interesting but still does not fully make up for the fact that combat is just as repetitive as in any other game. Select enemy, shoot, shoot, shoot, done.

If you're into role playing however, you will probably enjoy running up to 3 evil college boys that mug a nice old lady and burn them to ashes. I for one enjoyed it a lot for the first 3-4 levels.

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What's a Hero without missions to accomplish?

Not a Hero probably. So of course you have a line of missions that you can follow in City of Heroes, both solo and in a team. The Mission system reminded me of Anarchy Online. Upon retrieval of a mission you get one or more waypoints at which you have to do one or more tasks. These include for example wiping out villains in an abandoned warehouse, or just killing random enemies of a given faction on the streets. Entering buildings is done via zoning, they are instanced dungeons of some sort, just like in Anarchy Online. They are nicely crafted however, and diverse.

Do we ever get rid of the Level Treadmill?

My guess is û no. Because simply there is no way to replace it. There are only ways to make the process of leveling more interesting. City of Heroes gives you the opportunity to enhance your powers between levels by applying Enhancements to them. These enhancements range from reduction of endurance cost to more damage, a longer range and many more. You can also combine several enhancements of the same type applied to your power.

When you have reached a new security level you get either new enhancement slots for your current powers, or you can choose 1 new power. You must learn powers in your sets in linear order, you can only learn a power if you already learnt the previous ones. These security levels are also needed to enter certain Areas of the City like Perez Park, which is shut down and only accessible for Heroes with a security level of 7 or higher. These areas seem completely crowded with villains, you won't find any civilians in there.

A City full of heroes? How does that work out?

Pretty well. Paragon City is ought to be the biggest city in ôtodaysö United States, and claims to be ôbirthplace of the heroö. You can read up on why that is in the well written back story that is provided on the City of Heroes website.

Not only the storyline part is covered, also the technical one. Paragon City is separated into several suburbs, some of the being locked as mentioned above, and some of them freely available. You can reach other parts of the city via train, or by walking. Some of the parts of Paragon City are instanced , which lead to confusion on my part at first, but will be good for the old problem of spawn camping later on (yes, this again reminds me of Anarchy Online). However, there is more than enough space for everyone. And I never noticed any impact on the performance, no matter how many heroes were around me. This might be different on lower end systems though. For the record: I've been running this on a P4 3.2, Radeon 9800XT and 1GB of DDR RAM.

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One technical problem that I noticed though, but I might be wrong, was enormous lag when I entered Perez Park while it was crowded with both heroes and villains. This was due to my 1.5MBit/256KBit ADSL being fully used up by the game, a thing I never experienced before in a MMOG. I've been back to Perez Park several times after that, and the lag was gone, so it might have been a temporary thing.

This should be enough for a Preview, if you've been convinced that this is indeed your game then you should consider pre-ordering it. Pre-order customers get to start to play 3 days before everyone else.

And of course wait for our full review, and see all the City of Heroes screenshots in our City of Heroes Gallery.