City of Heroes Comments by John Walker

I always fancied playing this but not on my neolithic PC. Shame it was never ported to Xbox/360. Must have been a technical reason for it ?

it runs on suprisingly old machines...dont forget it is itself years old



and the reason there was no bugger in Paragon City? They were all in the Rogue Isles trying out their new villain epics! they are everywhere


I think there will be a lot of alts created as well as there are new power pools for the older characters...psychic powers for blasters seems to be a really popular one..as is fire melee for scrappers

but at the minute the novelty value is definitely in the villain epic characters..so everybody is playing them

Hmm wonder when the Guild Wars re-review is gonna come.

Re-review? strange.

Advert, maybe?

@ Ryze, try it's an MMO and this is pretty standard practise for a game of this nature.


I've always wanted to try this, but I seem to recall never being able to find a free trial, and I'm not really up for shelling out for an MMO I might not play.

@Ryze

EG have been re-reviewing all the major MMO's over the past few months. Keep up!

I loved CoH and CoV for a couple of months and there are still a lot of interesting ideas in the game (the character creation for example is above and beyond anything else currently out there) but I found it to be one of those MMO's that sadly gets very repetitive, very quickly.

Didn't it originally come out a few months before WoW? I think if they had got the game out sooner they might have stood a chance of getting a lot more attention then the game seemingly did.

That frontpage image looks like a union jack on the face.

"That frontpage image looks like a union jack on the face."

It is - that's Hero-1 (or Hero One, I get confused) who wound up in the Rikti dimension and got co-opted.

CoH/CoV is hands down the best MMO I've played, for the reasons talked about in this article. Anyone who has any interest in super-heroes should try it.

I got the game about 5 days early from work.

As far as i am aware i was one of the first people ever on the European server. It was amazing going around the city when it was completely empty except me.

Everyday i saw new people turn up untill launch when obviously it exploded. However 2 weeks later WoW came out...

I always fancied playing this but not on my neolithic PC. Shame it was never ported to Xbox/360. Must have been a technical reason for it ?

No technical reason beyond MMOs needing a keyboard for communication. Voice alone just wouldn't work for an MMO, in the same way that voice communication wouldn't work to sustain this forum. You could add a keyboard and mouse to a console I guess, but then you'll need a desktop and so on and so forth.

A re-imagined COH/V in a few years would be very welcome.

I really like this game and am forever staring wistfully at the boxes on my shelf, but then I remember how soul-crushingly repetitive it is. Such a shame.

Amazing how this reviewer slags off MMO's as early zones are empty (ish as I've spent more than 5 mins in them on both villains and heroes and they have been rammed recently, esp villains) - it's been out for 4 years.. and you can say the same about various areas in every MMO (inc WoW) after 2 years from release.
CoX used to be repetitive but is so much less and it's still the most creative, fun, imaginative MMO around, seriously it doesn't get much better than giving the smackdown to a bunch of crims and then flying into the sky for your next task.. Well worth playing if you haven't and if you used to play it - check it out, it has matured and improved in many many ways.

I'd give it a 9/10 personally.


P.S. It has one of the best communities you'll find anywhere too.

I think thats a fair score. Its a fairly polished mmo that's fun in short bursts; not to deep but the core combat is a lot of fun. I won't go back to it but I have good memories of the few months I did play.

I wonder which server the reviewer was on. On the Union server the framerate takes a solid hit as you go by Atlas statue in Atlas Park, as the connection struggles to keep up with loading the pile of heroes congregating around Ms. Liberty. Empty it is not.

I've been playing the free weekend (which lasted till yesterday, actually) with one of the newer powerset combos. I saw what must be new people, because they're too daft to understand simple English ("Send tells! No blind invites!"). They've not done enough with the user interface yet, sadly. You can change window sizes and colours/transparency, but once again there are bugs where it forgets the damn settings every zone change. With a heavily instanced game, this is a vey serious problem.

The faces also still look like a lower part of the anatomy. The while game is about a sixth the size of EQ2, Age of Conan and other modern games.

But..the many varied powersets still make it fun. The villains are a bit samey until the mid-teens, with nearly every enemy being quite predictable. Then they start using powers beyond differently coloured shots and punches, teleport friends, teleport away and ambush you etc. There are a few new contacts which give endless streams of random missions.

A good test of how active game is would be its auction house, and I think CoX passes that test. I can always get hold of lowbie salvage to make quick inventions, and not always at ridiculous prices. I haven't played since last summer, and back then I think you'd have needed to threaten people with physical violence to get a team. I have in fact never teamed up with villains not played by real-life acquaintances. It's a little more lively now.

I just wish people would learn to read! For anyone about to get the trial: Remember to talk to people before inviting them. The majority gets annoyed if not.

City of Heroes is the only MMORPG I ever liked. The premise is just so endearing. Xbox 360 version would be more than awesome. I'd be hooked from the get go.

I believe Cryptic Studios next MMO is heading to consoles as well as the PC.

A buggy piece of garbage that screwed up as soon as it was installed! what a waste of time.

I found it surprisingly very unfriendly to new players. I started up to a terribly designed tutorial as a villain getting out of prison, went out into a soulless yard with people beating on buggy, strange mobs and I didn't really know what to do. I was given a bog-standard 'kill X mobs' quest as you'd expect in an MMO and most of the mobs were buggy. Later on I was being told to arrive at a certain destination and I simply could not find or get to it... I was on, or near the marker on the map, but there was nothing to be done at the location, no buttons to press, no-one to speak to. I searched for a group to another quest for about 30-60 minutes. No responses at all. I really just didn't fee like continuing after this experience... even Eve felt more beginner friendly.

Its character customisation is brilliant, though.

COX was my first MMO and every thing after pailed in comparrison.

Teaming was so much fun.Happiest days of my gaming life.
Untill my wife threatened to leave.

Even after all this time, I still find myself coming back to CoH. Yeah, long-term it gets dull quick, but the beauty is that you can reroll a new hero and play it again and it's so different. And even at low levels, Cryptic have totally captured the essence of superPOWERs - you feel great blasting people with explosive flames or melting their brains...

Great fun.