Others say...

"Very fun, but incredibly glitchy"
I got this game around November/December last year, and although I enjoyed the game, I wished someone had warned me about a few things before I bought it, so I decided to write a review to do just that. Note that this is just MY experience, yours might be entirely different.

Let's start with the good. The character creation is simply wonderful. It's one of the (in my opinion) most fun aspects of gameplay. I love creating a character, shaping their origin and powers, etc. Oodles and oodles of fun, a veritable barrel full of snazzy monkeys. The game itself is a lot of fun as well, letting you live out childhood fantasies of flying about and being adored by the defenseless populace as you take down hordes of nefarious villians. The evil you face is varied and creative, and the missions are usually pretty interesting (although I get the urge to throttle someone the second I hear the words "bank mission"). The graphics are fantastic as well - I once thought about playing in "safe mode" with reduced graphics, but couldn't bear it before even seeing beyond what my character'd look like.

Now the bad.

After getting over the surprise that you pay for the game upfront and THEN pay regular payments afterwards (#&%@^*!!!), I noticed off the bat that after waiting for it to install, you have to wait for all the patches to install. Being an impatient person who was excited about getting to play the game, that was a kick in the head. After finally getting through that, I realize just how slowly EVERYTHING in the game loads. Normally I'd consider my computer on the fast side (not to mention new and with dsl), but you could grow gray hairs waiting for it to finish loading - if it doesn't disconnect halfway through.

Which is my main concern with City of Heroes. Losing connection to mapserver. I mentioned above that I am an impatient sort. I am also a violent person. So you can imagine how the words "Lost connection to mapserver" have me narrowly restraining myself from clawing through my monitor. Especially if I'm in the middle of a fight. Just recently it froze just as I had three Circle of Thorn members advancing upon me, and by the time I had gotten out of the game with a Ctrl/alt/del that completely screwed up my graphics and slowed down the computer, rebooted, clicked through everything that pops up when I log in, opened up City of Heroes, and waited for it to load, I came back to see my character crumpled on the grass and it telling me to go to the hospital (where I could earn some lovely experience debt). Oh joy. In fact, the last time I tried to get back on after that happening, it was frozen from the very beginning. This very problem is one reason why I almost always turn down requests to join a team, because it was really annoying and made me feel really guilty slowing the team down as they waited for me to be reconnected and find them again, even though they were all very considerate about it. (Although a note that the other reason I turn them down is I'm not a particularly social person and if an invite pops up while I'm being swarmed by gun-wielding gang members or if I'm asked repeatedly, again and again, it makes me increasingly anti-social. So a note: politeness is the best policy, my friends.)

But my final word is that if it isn't still frozen the next time I try to access the program, I'm sure I'll be playing it for quite a while. Because despite my many grievances towards it, it really is a great game that I really enjoy. So if you're willing to sacrifice a lot of time loading and rebooting and have patience with your games freezing all the time, but like a great game with awesome features and fun gameplay, City of Heroes is right up your alley.

"Worth your dollar!"
To start off I would like to tell you that I have had this game since Aug 2004. So, I have seen almost everything.

The patching, depending on your computer, can take awhile. This computer takes about half an hour to download a free new issue. This computer is five years old so unless you have some serious problems with your computer, there should not be too much trouble.

Once in game, there is the most wonderful character creation mode ever. Almost everyone I have met in the game has at least ten characters because the creation mode is so addicting. Unless people copy costumes, you never see the same costume.

The powers are also quite cool. Some people say that certain powers are more powerful than others but, depending on your style of play, you can make almost any of them work amazingly.

The leveling process is quite interesting. Depending on your level, the gameplay may be more fun than at other levels. I, personally, am extremely bored with the starting content because I have had the game for so long but for the most part, the rest of the journey (to 50) changes.

I also have to say that the community is great...there are some really active, fun players as well as "supergroups."

So, now you are thinking...Why for these bad ratings?
Well, for the most part, a lot of the bad ratings came at the very start of the game or around summer/fall of 2005, where there were major changes to the game to accommodate CoV and just in general. One of the major "nerfs" was to the Fire Powers of a Tanker(one type of hero). They weakened a power tremendously so that people would not "power-level" other characters. They also shortened the gap where you can get xp (e.g. level 41 tanker can not get xp if there is a 47 blaster on the team) This build had become very popular and with the power of fire went a lot of the CoH population. I have to say that whenever a power is quite powerful, it gets weakened. But hey, heroes have to push through those obstacles.

Slowly, but surely, that population is building back up and I encourage anyone looking at this game to buy it!!! (Champion Server);-)

Bottom Line: I am still playing aren't I!!!

One last thing, the game comes out with new Issues (expansion packs) on an average of every four months, not to mention patches and tweaks to fix game content. With the most expensive payments, it costs $60 for four months, though you can get it cheaper. Normal expansion packs cost about $40-$50. Those ten or so extra bucks for the fixes adds up to being worth it! (I am sure you can spare a couple dollars for the fun ;-) I dont see many other games cranking out expansion packs that quick!

"Fun, yet horrible"
i bought this game like 2 years ago, so im kind of late on the review.

anyways, i really thought the idea of being a hero with a whole arsenal of powers would be cool, and its awesome. this game can really help a kids dreams, such as flying, running at superspeed, teleporting, you name it. the game lasted me about a year though. then i gave it up for so many reasons its not even funny.

first off, i have dial-up, and unless u have dial-up too, u'll have no idea what im talkin about. the game updates so slow that i could leave it one all night and it wouldnt be done. its like theres a new update every month or somethin, cuase after you get through update 1, u got 5 more to go. if u have the life to make it past the next 5, u got 6 more to go (im being serious, it was horrible). and then, after u spend so much time updating the game, you finally get to play, only to find out your computer cant move fast enough to keep up with the rest of the game. if your hero walks into a highly populated area in the game, it just freezes. it gets incredibly annoyin when your in the middle of a fight and the game freezes, then the next thing you know ur on the ground dead. also, unless you have some really new and high tech computer, loading a into a new map in the game is so long you can leave the room, fix up lunch, come back and find out that the computer didnt even download a bit of the map. what else is annoying? how long a mission takes. at a point in the game, you'll be getting missions that take 2 hours to complete.
even though the game is really fun, its not even worth tryin to play.
so unless you have a really good computer, dont buy CoH, its a waste of money and huge chunks of ur life.

"City Of Heroes=good fun"
When I first got this game, it was crappy as heck, cost a good chunk of change per year, and barley fun. Of course, once my dad gave the old computer a 512 RAM boost, the game really stood out. Sure, it gets repetative sometimes, but the script is well-writen( and can somehow pull of both drama and slapstick comedy at the same time),The comunity is friendly, and c'mon, u get to be a hero. My main charicter is a level 31 invun/warmace tank and I just enjoy beating the stuffing out of thugs/arch-villians/corupt evil companies/Evil cults/zombies/1920 gangsters (no,, really!)/giant robots/ Nazi-like facits(origionaly a group founded by Hitler)and causing mass genocide to evil aliens from another dimention. The charicter creation is literaly infinite, the graphics are great, and you don't need Marvel or DC heroes to enjoy it.

"Ok game but system requirements off"
I picked this up recently. People were right about the low populations and such. I thought I'd be good because it said minimum requirement was like a pentium 700 and I had a pentium 3 1000 and I was able to play world of warcraft fine. It was so slow on my computer it was unplayable. It took like 15 seconds after I touched a key for the screen to update. It seems to run ok on a 2 ghz pc though.

It also seems to imply that you can play this on a dialup. The starting patch you get after you load it after you play is 1,200 megs. After I finished downloading it they had a new patch that was like 400 megs..

Luckilly I had DSL but it would of been a nightmare if I was using dialup, probably would of had to download for a week.

Gameplay seems allright and its nice change from some of the others, weird not having currency though.