City of Heroes

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.