For the little villain in all of us.
After creating your villain with the much loved character creator, the game places you in "The Zig", the super villain prison in the City of Heroes. This is where the tutorial begins and also the story. Lord Recluse, leader of the spider-influenced Arachnos army, has staged a massive breakout for super powered villains, searching for the "destined one". Once completing the tutorial, players select who will be their first contact, a mercenary named Burke or an agent of Arachnos called Kalinda. At the time of the game's launch, Kalinda was the only starting contact forcing villains to co-operate with Arachnos. The mercenary was added later giving the option to be somewhat freelance.
It's obvious after playing both City of Heroes and City of Villains that the "Villains" has a stronger focus on the story. Cut scenes have been added to certain missions and players encounter the same NPCs at various points in their villainous career, giving the game a much more connected feel. However, no matter how well written some of the story arcs may be, the game play can still become rather repetitive.
The majority of missions you receive will send you to a location within the current zone you're in and have "defeat" (apparently no one is ever killed) all the opponents in the building. Sometimes, only the boss and his cronies will need to be taken out to complete a mission. There are the missions that have you seek out specific objects and combinations of the three. Though in addition to the normal contacts, "brokers" have been introduced and through a series of random missions, villains can unlock a "heist" and rob a local bank. These missions which are picked up from opening a newspaper, makes getting new missions a breeze since you can just pop open the paper, select a mission, and be on your villainous way. The majority of missions will be in the zone in which they were received which cuts out the needless travel that is still rampant in City of Heroes.
Coming soon in addition to the newspaper missions will be the "mayhem missions", these replace the bank heists and puts villains in an instanced version of one of the zones featured in City of Heroes. These missions are a much welcomed change to the ordinary missions. Within the mayhem missions are bank heist and mini side-missions. It's during these mayhem missions that I felt most villainous as I rampaged through the clean streets of Paragon City blowing up parking meters and kicking the change around.
Most of the game play may still be repetitive, but just as any MMO, it's also a social environment and who you play with can make all the difference. Both City of Villains and City of Heroes has a strong community through the forums and within the game. Another new addition with City of Villains is the Super group Base building feature in which players can build teleporters, medical rooms, and unlock special missions. Though don't expect to build your own Fortress of Solitude. It takes either even a moderately sized super group a few months to build a fully functional base.
City of Villains may not be a groundbreaking game, but for anyone who's a fan of super villains and heroes, it's definitely worth playing.