City of Heroes/Villains

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.

The recently released issue 9 update has brought with it a fundamental change to the COH/V experience, the salvage system. Now you can find bits of salvage lying around post battle that, when combined using a recipe, can be used to create anything from extra powerful enhancements and inspirations to suitably fancy costume add-ons. It's not exactly revolutionary when compared to other MMO's but it goes someway towards keeping COH/V competitive even if it was a long time coming. Auction houses also make their first appearance under the guise of Consignment Markets or the Black Market depending which game you're playing, another addition that bring COH/V belatedly into line with newer MMOs.

You'll have noticed that for the most part I've been talking about COH rather than COV, and while they are separate games to a degree they're very much two sides of the same coin. While being evil rather than heroic is a fundamental ideology shift the core game plays out very similarly. Rescue missions and drug busts are swapped for kidnappings and bank robberies but there's really only a cosmetic difference between fighting you're way through thugs to rescue the victim and battling you're way through heroes protecting the target. A lot of the improvements released in COV at launch have found their way into COH over time including an instant access mission system (police radio for the heroes and newspapers for villains) and the ability for super groups to now own their own lairs/bases from which to launch their missions, these bases can also be attacked by rival super groups albeit via rather too polite pre-arranged raids.

For all the overwhelming positivity to be found up to now I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't now point out the most obvious of weak points, although even that's not entirely the game's fault. It's hard to be too critical of the graphics in a three year old game, especially an MMO, but even stood next to the now aging WoW, COH/V falls someway behind in the running. It's not that its ugly, its just that it's basic, every building and environment seems to have been rendered with the least possible number of polygons so while a city is never going to match the majesty of a huge fantasy environment there's still something very uninspiring about the drab boxy city you spend your hours running through. However, the characters you lovingly create are rendered in impressive detail for a game of its age and the enemies, while clearly less detailed, still hold up to closer scrutiny for the most part. It's not just in the looks department where things are showing signs of age either. The more practical elements of 3D engines have moved on a lot in the past three years too and its at times jarring to return to the days where things like getting caught on scenery still happen from time to time. The game's interface is well designed but it's still not without its strange quirks, you're unable to see your enhancements and your inspirations at the same time for instance and the otherwise helpful compass sometimes forgets your current objective when you travel between areas on the train. Some missions can also be a little vague in their location details too, more than once I had to refer to the printed map enclosed in the box to work out which area of the city contained the sub-area I was looking for. Of course it's possible to write off all of these things (especially the graphical ones) by saying it's a three year old game, but it's also a game that gone through 9 large updates not to mention however many small ones which you'd have hoped meant such problems really should have been ironed out by now.

Perhaps the one real stumbling block in the whole thing is the price, while the idea of paying a monthly subscription to play a game is now established we've yet to see the games that started it all offer any real price cuts to reflect their elder statesmen status. Weighing in at a penny less than nine pounds a month COH/V hasn't exactly become the budget MMO it perhaps should have. However, when you're having this much fun it's hard to be churlish about what amounts to still considerably less than a new game a month. And that's really the key to City of Heroes and City of Villains, despite looking a little dated and lacking some of the more complex features to be found in more modern MMOs what it does offer is a massive sense of fun and the feeling that everything is geared towards letting the player simply enjoy the feeling of being a super hero/villain rather than worrying about all the other things that can bog down more serious MMOs. This may put off as many people as it encourages but if you've ever dreamt of being in your own comic book then City of Heroes and City of Villains offer exactly the kind of wish fulfilment none of the officially licensed superhero games have been able to match.