The Andrew Extravaganza

This last week was my first opportunity to log serious play time on a MMORPG. I started out building a Natural Scrapper, a regular human blessed with natural ability that uses hand to hand attacks to defeat his foes. The katana was my weapon of choice and I used it to destroy countless enenmies in the Galaxy City, Atlas Park, and King's Row sections of the City of Heroes.

I got to level 10 before I was completely bored with my character. I had gone mostly solo up until level 7. Leveling is pretty fast up until that point and the excitement of gaining new powers really keeps you going. Playing on a team was fun for a while too. At least until I realized how useless a scrapper was on a team.

The tankers are better suited at taking on bosses because they can sustain much more damage and the blasters are better offensive weapons because they can deal heavy damage from far away. The scrapper can't take enough punishment from the bosses to stand in an fight them so it's relegated to beating up on the minions. And I guess that's fine, but I don't need to be on a team to fight weak opponents. Part of the appeal of the team is the ability to fight a mob of higher level guys so you can rake in the experience.

Sensing that I was about to be finished playing this game forever, I went back to the start and built a new character. This time it was a Technology Blaster. It seems like the blaster is the most used and most dominant character. They can stand back and destroy opponents with their ranged attacks. It only gets tricky when the bad guys start to chase you because the blaster has poor defense. Leveling is faster with a blaster than with a scrapper because of this. With the scrapper it was a chore to take on more than a couple of yellow guys (more powerful). As a blaster I was able to fight red guys(a lot more powerful) and a purple guys (ridiculously more powerful) if he was alone. I'm at level 7 now and my interest in the game is waning.

CONCLUSION: The game is fun for a while, as long as you can gain new levels quickly so you can keep trying out new powers. After that the complete lack of a story kills the enjoyment factor. They do have missions you can do, but they mostly consist of a two or three sentence prompt telling you to go kill a number of one gang type for some reason that isn't very compelling. Perhaps at higher levels a real story line may exist, but I get bored too soon to ever find out.

Outside of killing more powerful enenmies and gaining a new power every other level, there isn't much to do in City of Heroes. In Star Wars Galaxies players can build their own cities, build products (clothes, weapons, etc.) for other players to buy, and fight other players. If I had to buy one game it would be Star Wars Galaxies, not City of Heroes.

One other thing that I noticed was the ineffectiveness of the City of Heroes police force. There must be hundreds of cops walking their beats, but I've never seen a successful arrest. Usually the police officer is being terrorized by a group of gang memebers and requires the help of a hero to be set free. Taking into account how useless the cops are and the saturation of the city with super heroes, why doesn't city hall just cut the police force and save the tax payers some money?

Hey you finally got the comment system to work. I would recommend using a spam blocker before you get hit with a load of spam.

Anyway, I think the game is pretty good and I was hoping to play a little bit when I get my PC.

Looks like it's time for a new post.