The standalone expansion to City of Heros starts with a bang but ends up falling short where it counts, gameplay.
The first thing you do in any MMO is character creation and CoV does this better than any I have seen. The costumes you can create are unreal. You can make any villain under the sun with millions of possibilities. Once this is out of the way you jump into training and have to escape from a jail. It really just shows you the basics of the gameplay.
Once thats over with you are left on your own in the city to fight the good guys and other baddies. The quest range from killing x amount of this baddy to go ing out and robbing a bank. The missions are part of the initial appeal, they tend to be a bit different then other MMOs out there. While in a mission on CoV it plays like Guild Wars, and you are the only one in the zone at the time. Kinda dissappointing to pay per month for this and get the same thing as a game you can play for free.
The gameplay in CoV is very simple and gts very boring after a bit. I loved this game for the first 20 hours or so, but seeing the same quests and the same level design repeat every time just killed it for me. The newspaper feature allows you to scan the headlines of the paper and pull quests out of it. The first time I got to do this (once you hit port oaks lvl 8 or so), there where 3 quests available and all of them were kidnapping. It seems you kidnap a lot of people in this game. All you do is enter a building, which looks like all the others (layout, skins, etc) work your way to the top floor and find the girl and thats it.
If you are looking at a game that plays a different from WoW, then I would suggest getting Guild Wars instead, not only is it the same as CoV, just a different setting, but it has fre online play.