A decent game, with some strange user interface design choices and what feels like a very repetitive gameplay experience.
My younger brother has been playing City of Heroes since it was in beta testing, I believe. He has spent countless hours building up his superheroes and battling evildoers in Paragon City. When NCSoft offered existing players the opportunity to have their friends try the game for two weeks at no charge, he sent me the information to check it out. Over last weekend, I spent probably 12 hours or more playing CoH. I think I have a pretty good feel for the game now, at least enough to provide my impressions of it based on a couple of solid days' worth of playing.
There is a lot I can say that's good about the game. The graphics are impressive for a MMORPG. They're certainly better than my favorite MMORPG, Ultima Online. But it takes a bit more than graphics to hold my interest. The sounds, too, are good and not overdone. There is not a constant music track, but there are musical queues at "generally appropriate" points (though sometimes those cues flared up on me and I had no idea why - I wasn't in combat or about to engage in any). The controls are responsive and I didn't notice any network lag to speak of. It's a fairly easy game to just sit down and start with.
But there were quite a few things I didn't like about the game. For instance, you don't use the mouse to turn the character left/right like you would in a typical first-person shooter. You use the keyboard. There are in fact 9 movement keys arranged under your left-hand (QWE, ASD, etc.). What does the right hand do? Not much, in the default configuration. Firing your powers/weapons is not done with keys on the right hand, but with 1, 2, 3, etc. That means you have to take your hand off the movement keys to fire. This is especially frustrating when you are fighting an enemy that backs away from you or runs off. You can mitigate this somewhat by "queing up" a power to use while running at the enemy, but that's not ideal. While you can indeed re-map the keys used to control the character, in my experience the response to the re-mapped keys is markedly slower than the default control keys. I wound up living with this delayed response because it was more useful to me than having to stop moving to attack.
Another thing I didn't particularly like was some of the inconsistency in the game's interface for other things. For example, moving from one area of the city to another (in some cases) involves only walking through a doorway or opening. In other cases, which look more or less the same, you have to click on something or someone to get through. In the case of the mass-transit system, the doors open but you can't walk into the train. Instead, you have to click on the train, select your destination from a list, and wait. I found myself often asking people how to get from where I was to where I needed to be. It wasn't easy to sort out on my own.
While the designers keep a fledgling superhero out of areas where death is a practical certainty, I did find myself on a couple of occasions as a level 8 player in an area where groups of level 16+ enemies were congregating. It might have been nice getting a warning going in to the effect that "Hey, you do know the average mob on the other side of this doorway is a level 18?" I didn't find this out until I was pretty far into the map, far enough that I decided to go on, only to find that the next area was level 22+...
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