City of Heroes

aka: City of Hero, City of Heroes: Deluxe Edition, CoH, Yingxiong Chengshi
Moby ID: 13083
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/17 11:54 AM )
Add-on (official) Included in Special Edition

Description official descriptions

City of Heroes is the first Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) that lets you step into the pages of a comic book. Set in the 3D world of Paragon City, USA, you become a Super Hero spending your days fighting evil doers, assisting other heroes, forming Super Groups (complete with their very own Team costume), and mentoring Sidekicks. You are able to choose your Origin story and your Archetype, or style of play. There are hundreds of powers for a player to choose from, including learning to fly like Superman or run like the Flash. This is a online game and requires both internet access and a monthly fee.

Spellings

  • θ‹±ι›„εŸŽεΈ‚ - Chinese spelling (simplified)

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

Credits (Windows version)

166 People (143 developers, 23 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 83% (based on 39 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 14 ratings with 1 reviews)

It's CLOBBERIN' time!

The Good
- The urban setting. Paragon City is the first virtual video game city I've ever experienced that really felt like a city.

  • The 4-color comic book feel.

  • The character generator. You could seriously spend hours (and I have!) just fiddling around with costumes and characters. It's the most robust costume generator I've seen yet in a video game, and I know a lot of folks who would buy the game just to have the character generator if they could use it offline.

  • The writing. All of the villain groups have a backstory, which is revealed to you as you complete missions. The backstories are usually interesting, and give you context for your battles against Evil(tm).

  • The unintentional humor. Big, brutish thugs who could beat your super-strong superhero into a thin paste...who nonetheless can't seem to yank a purse out of the hands of a little old lady. Gang members trying to break into park benches and forklifts. Zombies scaring innocent civilians by pounding their chest and making OOGA-BOOGA faces at them.

  • The fact that, as you complete missions, random NPC civilians will talk about your character, as this screenshot demonstrates. I mean, it can't have been very difficult to code in, and it's such a minor part of the game. But it's always amusing to see people talking about your character.

    The Bad
    -The repetitive nature of the game. ALL you do is combat. You run missions. The missions are either "Go beat the snot out of a certain number of a certain type of bad guy" or "Go to a location and beat the snot out of the bad guys inside." Sure, some of them are "Save a few hostages from the bad guys," but how do you save the hostages? Beat the snot out of the bad guys. And in between running missions, you can run around on the streets, beating the snot out of the bad guys.

Granted, the way they've implemented the superheroic combat system is superb. And the various storylines keep the game interesting. But if you're looking for an MMORPG that lets you do things other than combat, welp, this ain't the one for you.

The Bottom Line
City of Heroes strides into territory previously uncharted in the MMORPG realm: the world of Superheroic MMORPGs. If you've ever longed to soar through the skies, cape fluttering behind you in the breeze, as you sally forth to thwart the Forces of Evil(tm), then City of Heroes is the game you've been looking for.

The first thing you notice when you log in is the character generator. You pick from a limited number of Archetypes (Blaster, Controller, Defender, Scrapper, or Tanker). The Archetype you choose defines your character's main role in the game. Tankers are damage sponges, Blasters are long-range artillery, and so forth.

Within each archetype is a collection of Primary and Secondary powersets. You can mix and match these any way you like. You can play a Stone Armor/Stone Melee tank, if you like. Or you can play a Stone Armor/Ice Melee tank. Or any other combination of primary and secondary powers.

Once you've selected your powersets, you find yourself in the exceptionally well-done character designer. Trillions of possible combinations exist to personalize your character's look. You can give your character a medieval armor look, or put him in street clothes, or dress her like a schoolgirl, or give him the look of a martial artist. You can make high-tech robot heroes and traditional 4-color spandex heroes. The possibilities are far, far too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say, though, that if the character generator can't precisely match the idea you have in your head, it can get close to it.

After the character generation process, you will find yourself in a brief tutorial that's worth playing. (Hint: If you kill 100 of the Contaminated gang members you find in this tutorial, you'll get a special badge you can't get any other way.)

After the tutorial, you're thrust into the wild and wooly world of Paragon City. In the fictional setting of City of Heroes, Paragon City is the largest city in the USA. It's even larger than New York City. (Amusingly, according to the game's backstory, Paragon City is in Rhode Island. Hell, it IS Rhode Island.) Being so big, it has lots of room for superpowered humans and aliens and beings from other dimensions to rub shoulders together and fight lots of crime. Which is good, because there's a LOT of crime in Paragon City.

The game is quite friendly to new players. Once you enter Paragon City proper, you're immediately given things to do. Every player starts with a contact. This contact will give the player missions. Missions are instanced, so there's no worries about conflicts with other people doing the same mission.

The missions are designed to reveal small pieces of the game's backstory a little bit at a time. If you fight Vahzilok missions, for example, you will slowly gain information on the Evil Dr. Vahzilok and his plans to...achieve something or other. (I haven't gotten far enough along in the game to know exactly what his plans are. But rest assured, they're Evil(tm)!) Most missions can be done solo, though you can always bring friends if you like (the mission difficulty will automatically adjust itself based on the number and power-level of your group). Some missions require a group, unless you outlevel the mission. There are also Trials and Task Forces. These are major story-arc missions, some of which require several hours of game time to complete.

In between missions, you can thwart crime on the street. The streets of Paragon City are choked with various bad guys out harassing innocent citizens, and you can save these citizens if you wish.

For the most part, Paragon City is superbly realized. Skyscrapers tower over the streets below, the low-rent industrial district of Kings Row feels like a low-rent industrial district, and so on. Titanic statuary is all over, honoring heroes from years past. Paragon City also recently had a major alien invasion on its streets, and so some areas are wastelands, filled with rubble, shattered buildings, overturned cars, and marauding gangs.

The nice thing about City of Heroes is that there's almost always something to do. New missions to go on, new places to see, new badges to collect, new portions of the backstory to uncover, and so on. If you've been thinking about dipping your toe into the MMORPG pool, this would be a good game to start with.

Windows · by Afterburner (486) · 2005

Discussion

Subject By Date
what do you do when the parent company pulls the plug? Pseudo_Intellectual (66248) Apr 24, 2019

Trivia

1001 Video Games

City of Heroes appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Christopher Reeve memorial

As City of Heroes is centered around superheroes, some players have set up a living memorial at the Virtue server upon learning of the passing away of Christopher 'Superman' Reeve at October 10, 2004.

Comic

A subscription to the game also, as of 2005, gets you a subscription to a real, actual monthly comic book based on the game, and featuring prominent NPCs from the game as main characters. The game's comic book sometimes features actual players' characters.

Novels

On top of a collectible card game, numerous comic books and a pen-and-paper RPG, CDS published two novels set in the City of Heroes universe: The Web of Arachnos (2005), by Robert Weinberg; and The Freedom Phalanx (2006), by Robin D. Laws. (A third, The Rikti War, was written by Shane Hensley and due for 2006 publication, but never released.)

Rating

Cryptic Studios originally refused to release the game with anything harsher than an E rating. This, obviously, did not happen, as the game is rated T.

Role playing server

Though there is technically not an official Role Playing (RP) server, the Virtue server has been the "unofficial RP Server" since the game was originally launched.

Universe merge

In July 2008 NCsoft announced the complete merger of its City of Heroes and City of Villains titles into one game universe. Current subscribers who only had one of the titles received access to the features of both games, and new sales grant access to both.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2009 – Most Humorous Trailer of the Year
  • Computer Games Magazine
    • March 2005 - #9 Game of the Year
  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2005 (Issue #249) – MMORPG of the Year
    • March 2005 (Issue #249) – Best Character Creation of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2004 – #8 PC Game of the Year
    • 2004 – Best Use of Spandex of the Year (PC) (for its character creation system)
    • 2011 – #5 Top Superhero PC Game (together with City of Villains)

Information also contributed by Afterburner, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, Weston Wedding and Zack Green

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

City Life: 2008 Edition
Released 2007 on Windows
Hoosier City
Released 1992 on DOS
Company of Heroes
Released 2006 on Windows, 2020 on iPad, Android
Stranger of Sword City
Released 2016 on Xbox One, PS Vita, Windows
City Life: World Edition
Released 2006 on Windows
City of Secrets
Released 2009 on Windows, 2011 on iPhone, Macintosh...
Heroes of Might and Magic II: Gold
Released 1998 on DOS, Windows
City Life
Released 2006 on Windows

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 13083
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by aerynsun.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Indra was here, Jeanne, Apogee IV, mw, Weston Wedding, Sciere, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added May 9, 2004. Last modified March 11, 2024.