City of Heroes

Monday, October 29, 2007

When I first came to the UK, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on World of Warcraft and when I started playing it, I was instantly hooked. So I figured, here’s this great MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and surely, there should be some more great games in the horizon? My total love of Superheroes of course led me to NCSoft’s City of Heroes, which in theory, should have been great. I was expecting to be blown away, but the crushing disappointment still looms unfortunately.

The theory behind the game is quite a good one. You get to build your very own Superhero, from their appearance to their powers and abilities and you can even form your very own group of evil fighting super friends. You get to explore Paragon City, a true city of heroes, as the plot refers it to. You fight in the war against tyranny and crime and level your Superhero, increasing their strength and powers. On your journey to greatdom, you encounter super villains, madmen, criminals, aliens, evil organizations and an assortment of other fiends.

I think that perhaps World of Warcraft has spoiled me in the sense that it’s just got better graphics and better gameplay. As for the fact that it is also much more newbie friendly, that just means I won’t be referring City of Heroes to any of my less PC gaming friends, as I try to force them all to join me in World of Warcraft all the time. The controls for City of Heroes is also just not something I can seem to get use to, again, prolly spoiled because of WoWs easy interface… not just easy, but so much more practical. And I have to give it to Blizzard, World of Warcraft has superb graphics, the game doesn’t lag and their customer support is top notch. Weekly game maintenance means that you can’t play Wednesday mornings, which is fine because the end result is totally worth it. While playing City of Heroes, I had to endure constant game lags (not those 5 second lags I get in WoW, which only last a little while) but serious lag which got so frustrating I couldn’t play at all. And at times, the graphics gets so bad that I couldn’t play, having to wait or restart till it got sorted again. And no, I PC was built for gaming.

Minimum System Requirements:
Microsoft Windows 2000/XP
Intel Pentium III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon® 800 MHz
512 MB RAM
DVD-ROM drive
4 GB available hard disk space
NVIDIA GeForce 2 or ATI Radeon 8500 or Intel i865G Series graphics card
DirectX 9.0c
16-bit sound card
56k Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse.

All in all, not a game I’d recommend, but again, my adoration for Superheroes might force me to still play another couple of times.

Happy shopping!