CoH - Review @ Play.tm

Play.tm reviews the current state of the game for City of Heroes and Villains players.

With City of Heroes and City of Villains now almost three and two years old respectively it's perhaps a strange time to be giving these already firmly established MMO's the review treatment, but with the recent release of the latest free update, issue 9, now seems as good a time as any to re-assess them and see how they hold up in today's significantly more crowded MMO marketplace. To cement their already obvious links both games now come in the same single DVD pack and your subscription fee covers both titles effectively giving you two games for your money, albeit two games cut from very similar cloth. For the uninitiated, and as their names suggest, both titles centre around taking your created hero or villain and trying to either protect or rule the streets of Paragon City depending on which one you're playing. It's a simple yet fundamentally brilliant idea for an MMO that holds up now just as well as it did at launch. It's also unashamedly fun, stripped of some of the more complex MMO features it gives a much purer experience for those fresh to the genre or anyone jaded by the serious complexity of other titles. By concentrating solely on the bits people who want to play superhero games are most interested in, namely superpowers and character abilities, rather than any of the more involved economics of other MMOs, COH/V manages to deliver a pair of finely focused games that understand what their audience wants and aren't ashamed to provide it by the bucket load.