User Rating: 9.3 | City of Heroes PC
I've played just about every MMORPG since EQ with the hopes of regaining that WOW ! experience I first received when I started EQ 4 years ago. Every game that promised to be the next generation MMORPG ended up strongly disappointing me. Well the next generation of MMORPGs are finally here, and they are not heralded in by WoW or EQ II, but by City of Heroes ! Now before you lable me a sycophant who is just following the crowd I wish to say that when I first heard of this title I was extremely sceptical. I expected cutesy graphics and game play like a Superman comic (doesn't matter which era, Superman was and remains the most boring title in comics history.) But on the strength of reviews, my disgust with the Lineage II Beta, and my exhaustion with my ever raiding EQ uberguild, I picked this up as on a lark (kind of like when I first bought EQ). I've played it fairly constantly for the last couple of days and I am highly impressed. Now for some details some of which are redundant i know - Character customization is amazing, you should never run across another player that looks exactly like you and you will rarely see anyone even close. The game plays excellently - With a mediocre system you should get virtually no lag even though the power effects are fairly complicated, and there may often be a dozen or so NPCs in the screen at once (plus an occasional car or subway car. The city itself looks great, for the most part it is a dank slum with trash and thugs assaulting NPCs everywhere. You start out basically roughing up some street hoods and doing favors for your first contact. This leads to the beginning of story arcs involving the street gangs, satanic cults, reanimator types and robots. The story unfolds more as you meet more contacts and do more missions for them. Right now I feel I am just at the tip of the iceberg as to where all this is going to lead. These missions often are as simple as go out and take down 10 of street gang X, however at the end you get some information on the gang's agenda which may lead to another contact or another mission. So doing these missions feels more like doing Quests in a stand alone RPG like BGII rather than say your typical MMORPG noob quest "go out and bring me 10 rat turds so I can fertilze my garden and I will give you some carrots". Right now the game appears to be confined to several zones making up one city, but these zones are sprawling, filled with lots of back alleys and buildings that you can climb on top of using fire escapes (or flying though it takes a few levels before anyone can really do more than float). However the potential of this game really staggers the mind. If you think of all the crap the Fantastic Four got into back in the day (the '70s) you know what I am talking about. Space travel ala an SG-1 type expansion is a possibility, or rifts to places like Hell or alternate realities certainly is very doable. Even time travel or a spin off that sends our characters off to a Grimjack/Planescape type nexus of dimensions could certainly fit the scenario. (though that may be a fitting basis for City of Heroes II) Yes there are no trade skills, yes there is no gear so you better be happy with how your character looks when you start since you don't get to change clothes. However there are lots of super powers to choose from and lots of different ways to tweak them out and make them work just a little differently than anyone else. But most importantly, there is no camping and very little down time. This really is the next step in on line gaming so quit second guessing yourself and get in on it now. 
