Yep, I’m talking about City of Heroes again! I last talked about the game 2 years ago, back when the private servers surfaced. Today, I want to do a full-on review of my favorite game! City of Heroes is one of the games that allowed me to nurture my creativity, while also providing me with one of the best superhero video-games I’ve ever played. Today, I will fully review this game and look at what made the original release back in 2004 so great.
First, some backstory: City of Heroes was a game that was announced in the early 2000s. It was advertised as a “Superhero MMORPG”, one that would allow you to fully create your own superhero and venture into a massive open city with it. You’d do battle with super-villains, establish your own super-team, and gain new powers and abilities along the way.
The game was advertised heavily in gaming magazines in the years leading up to its release, before eventually coming out in 2004 to glowing reviews and praise. City of Heroes was and still is a game like no other, due in large part to the fact that it had no real competition for the longest time.
Champions Online and DC Universe Online cropped up later, but only after City of Heroes had been out for a few years. City of Heroes was a truly masterful superhero MMO, but was unfortunately shut down back in 2012. With no real reason given for the shutdown and no way feasible way to play it, the fan-base became disgruntled.
NCSoft, who is City of Heroes’ publisher, dealt with a ton of backlash as a result. The backlash was so massive that the fan-base never truly forgave them for the closure. Almost 7 years after the shutdown, City of Heroes returned in the form of private servers! So, what makes this game so great?
For one thing, the character creator is amazing! You can customize your superhero’s costume, size, and even the look of his/her superpowers! The game provides thousands of different clothing options, along with many different sliders for each part of the body. This gives the game one of the most extensive character creation systems ever!
Before creating your character, the game makes you choose an “Origin”. You choose your origin from one of 5 different paths: Magic, Natural, Science, Mutation and Technology. Your origin defines what enhancements you can get for your character. Then you dive into the INSANE amount of powersets and abilities you can give your character.
You have stuff like claws, martial arts skills, the ability to shoot lasers, super strength, gadgets, and even radioactive powers! Of course, because of the insane amount of servers, there are many different powers divided between them. A lot of content is restricted between servers, depending on who owns them. Of course, they all have the base game powers.
The combat is pretty basic, nothing too special. You press different number keys to activate your abilities, use them on your enemies and try not to die. It’s often quite repetitive, but the large amount of abilities and powers on display here do make up for it.
Of course, the big thing about this game is its lore and characters. From the heroic Freedom Phalanx to the villainous Arachnos, there are tons of super-powered organizations and characters on display here. Your hero, villain, or anti-hero exists within one of the game’s various cities and takes on missions within. A lot of these missions are part of story arcs, some of which are pretty awesome.
One of my favorite was a sort of fantasy-based story that a trio of magical floating books sent me into. From there, I saved a random farm from an army of robots and it was great! Then there was a tournament I did on the villains side, where I fought other villains and eventually teamed up with all of them to defeat an even greater threat.
Stuff like this is what makes City of Heroes great. Couple that with an intensive upgrade system that doesn’t rely on randomly dropped weapons or armor, along with a vast open world filled with colorful characters and you have a recipe for success. And successful it was, for nearly a decade. Even after the official servers shut down, people are STILL coming back to play it on private servers and I think that’s great.
However, having grown up with the game and playing it now in modern day, I can tell that there are parts of it that have not aged well. While the dated graphics do have their charm, it can sometimes hamper the whole “create a character” experience. You can make a custom character look nearly identical to a copyrighted character, but they’ll only ever look like a PS2 version of said character. That doesn’t change how extensive and awesome the system is, but the lacking visuals does leave a bit to be desired.
Also, there’s the combat system I brought up earlier. It’s one of the reasons that I often quit the game and wouldn’t come back to it for months, it came down to how repetitive it was. It doesn’t help that 90% of the areas you go to in the game look identical. There’s little that differentiates one warehouse interior from another. So when you couple a dated combat system together with a multitude of areas that are all identical to each other, you get a rather same-y feeling after a while.
City of Heroes is still a good game, even in 2021. Sure, it’s not pretty and its dated systems would probably turn a lot of people off. Still, it’s character creator is second-to-none and the amount of super powers you can get in this game is insane. I have yet to see a superhero game that tops this one, aside from maybe Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Once more I recommend this awesome game to those who haven’t played it. There are tons of great private servers now, way more since the last time I talked about this game. Give this classic a shot sometime!
Syrup With A Side Of Writing 