City of Heroes Reviews
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City of Heroes is an MMORPG only in the fact that you take on the roll of a superhero you customize. I would really call it a Massively Mulitplayer version of State of Emergency, without the option to be bad. It has some pluses: it is fun to play, for short periods of time, you can spend hours playing around with all the visual options in character creation, and it's easy to play. But, it has a lot of minuses: it's repetitive, at times it's very counter-intuitive (mostly because you don't get any information beyond (do this)), it has little-to-no sense of community, and honestly, I think it's over-priced. This is bargin-bin game in fancy wrapping. I will play a little more, and probably when the expansion comes out I will try that, but my interesting is waning fast.
The second is at Warcry with an overall score of 8.7/10:
There are two ways to bust crime in Paragon City. The first one is probably the most familiar to MMORPG veterans. You can wander around and kill groups of mobs, but what Cryptic has done with spawning these criminals into the game world is very innovative, though. To help keep the suspension of disbelief, you won't see criminals spawn they will appear when people aren't looking. They will also talk quite often, giving you a clue as to where they are at, and they can appear most anywhere on top of buildings, even. Nothing is more satisfying then finding a group on top of a building and using a knock-back attack that sends their leader falling hundreds of feet so you can (arrest) them. Another way to bust crime is in (door missions), which are, essentially, instanced areas that are created when you accept the mission from your contact. These can be short or long and generally involve arresting thugs, their leaders, and getting what are known as (blinkies). Blinkies are things like stolen jewels or drug labs that need to be destroyed. Missions are also used to progress (story arcs), which are a series of missions with a continuing story. These are all pretty neat, and the stories involved with them are pretty entertaining.
And you'll even find a review of the City of Heroes comic book at HomeLan Fed with an overall score of 80%:
However, Dakan also spends at least as much time exploring the three hero's personal lives, from Apex talking to his sister over the phone about his "job" to Horus' memories of his super hero career, including dealing with the game's backstory of the alien Rikti's invasion which turns out to be a tragic one for Horus. Dakan can get a little too chatty at times but the work he has done for the first issue compares quite favorably to Kurt Busiek's work on Astro City where superheroes are treated more realistically while still being in a comic book super hero universe. Brandon Mckinney's artwork is a little too cartoony for my tastes but it is still serviceable. The first issue also has fan prose fiction, some FAQs on the game itself and more City of Heroes content.
