Tony Gallichan is Mildly Perturbed by... City of Villains
You know, the world of the massively multi player online roleplaying game is a fraught one. There are beauties and wonders, but for all the majesty there are shambling monsters, little green blobs of.....oh, hang on.....no.....thats from something coming up in the Buccaneer Chronicles...Nutbunnies.
So, after trying World Of Warcraft, which quite frankly left me cold, I went back to Star Wars galaxies which had had a combat upgrade. I was just getting my groove thang back, making money, reorganising the Freelance peacekeeping Agency (Swiflty - and with style!) and had just taken over the town of Jealhimet, icluding it's citizens, when they released a new patch for th egame and again it stopped working on my machine.
Ooh, but I was miffed, I can tell you. So I took a couple of weeks off with the intention of not doing much and saving some money. Then the people behind City Of Heroes decided that for someone to keep all their charecter names they had to log them in every three months.
Bollocks.
So, this meant I had to go backj to the game. After all the hassles of when I last played, inter player dynamics etc, I didn;t think I'd enjoy it. But I was wrong. Without all the hassles of running an SG, I was able to have a bit of fun. There's still not much high end content, but with the addition of new power sets etc, the game was a giggle again.
So much so that i went for the beta of City of Villains.
Beofre I describe the game, I will say that the Villains beta was nothing like the heroes one. Whereas in the heros' beta everything ran smoothly, the villain's one was an absolute nightmare.
But the game went live anyway. And yes, there's a lag problem. It doesn;t help that the game needs a higher spec pc then heroes - nmeans my machine struggles badly with it.
But what it like, I don;t hear you ask. Well, very similar to heroes - and very differnet.,
The control interface is exactly the same, with a few tweaks that got passed onto heroes also. The tutorial is shorter and more fun and a good way into the game. And the new areas are quite nice - it seems Villains has taken a leaf out of Hollywood's book and decided that all villains must be British as suddenly red phone boxes are sprouting up all over the place, cor blimey, luv a duck etc etc.
The new Villainous powersets are fun. Theres been a bit of a mix n match, a reshuffle of some of the old powersets from heroes as well as completly fresh ones. Theres now an assasin which is like a scapper in the old game, but is more stealthy, and of course, theres the Master Mind. This is the one thatsa lot of fun - you get minions!!!! You can choose from mercenaries, ninjas, zombies or robots. Every 6 levels you automatically get a new minion. They soon build up, I can tell you. being in a team with several mid range Master Minds means the screen is filled with minions of various shapes n sizes. It also means that the game starts to get presented in slide show formate - one frame every minute or so, lol.
There are a couple of new map styles - new types of caves for example, but on the whole the mission maps are identical to heroes.
Theres a couple of other invovations - you can now read the newspaper to get missions - and every 4 or 5 of them and you get a heist job where you rob a casino or bar or some such.
So all in all good fun - if a bit samey. But with the new pvp zones (which Ive only explored slightly due to extreme slowdown on my machine and also the fact that some folk are being complete gits) and having heroes as well the whole thing is quite a package now.
Recomended - if only for a laugh with your mates after a night down the pub.
Tony Gallichan has Space Mumps, toothache and is basically falling apart. As a result the Christmas Mr Dalek story will be brought to you some time before Christmas - just not in this update. So, you get a nice surprise...ain't it great?