All in all, City of Heroes is a great idea executed well enough.
First you select your class, there are five to start out with and two to unlock when you take a character up to level 50, the max in the game. Each class has its own special powers and abilities, as you may have guessed. You can also select how your character got his or her powers. It could be from mutation, a lab accident, from training, etc. Depending on your choice, you’ll get another attack or ability.
Next up is the character creation screen. The character creation in the game is deep and intuitive. You can select your hero’s primary colors, skin tone, head shape, costume (and there are probably ten subcategories in there). The game even lets you write a brief bio of your hero, allowing you to think up a back story for your character. You can also write a custom battle cry, but this amounts to next to nothing as all it will do is show up in a thought bubble above your head when you use it.
Once you are done with that, you can choose to either enter Paragon City right away, or play through one of the most tedious tutorials ever put into a game. The only plus to the tutorial is that it guarantees you will be at level 2 by the time you enter the game’s world.
Once in the world you will begin to take on quests and level up. You can meet friends online and create temporary teams, all it really amounts to is you’ll be able to track your friends easier since you can’t have team quests. A more serious alternative to teams would be joining a super-group, as you can visit the group’s hideout.
The game is solid, but repetitive. You go on short quests that involve you going to an enemy hideout and beating them all up, maybe rescuing someone or collecting evidence as well. You can roam the streets and engage random thugs for some experience points, but beyond that it’s nothing special. It’s a very repetitive formula that makes you question the value of your $35+ purchase, as that covers the purchase of the game as well as one month of play.
All in all, City of Heroes is a great idea executed well enough. I recommend you play the game until you get to level 5 or so before you buy it, just to make sure the game is right for you. This isn’t a great MMORPG, or a great game, but it’s still neat to create your own superhero.