Rating: 
Summary: I'm Level 15 and still going
Review: First off let me get out of the way that i have not had the glaring technical issues that others seem to of had. In fact i have had an almost perfect run of things. My system specs are a 3.0 ghz P4 with a radeon 9800 pro video card an a gig of ram, also i connect via a cable modem. I have had no problems at all with this configuration. I usually keep up to date on my drivers and so forth, so that could be part of it. Now on to the actual game...
This is my first attempt at a mmorpg. I had steered clear of eq, and the others because i had no desire to hang out with a bunch of 12 year olds. I couldn't pass up the chance to play as a super hero however. I have managed to make it to level 15 pretty much by myself without having to group with others. So if you are worried that your success with this game will hinge upon others, it doesn't all that much. I have played some with another character as parts of groups and the such, which can be enjoyable, and is not that difficult to form. There is some repetition to this game. The enemies do look the same over and over, but only if you stay in the same area, and pretty much can be said of any normal rpg. After the first few levels, as you travel about the city via running, flight, jumping... you will find a barrage of incresingly difficult enemies to combat. Graphicly, this game is far and above. What really gives you this is once you learn to fly, and can fly onto rooftops, and the such, and see the detail of the landscape as the weather paterns change and so forth. Overall i am giving this a 4 out of 5 mostly because no pvp, which will be coming soon, the limitations of the character build system, i.e. You either have to be long range or close, there is no inbetween, so mix, and so forth, and a lack of super villains as of yet, which should also be fixed with city of villains. My advice is if you have a love of comics or super heroes and such, get in now on the ground floor, because it can only get better from here.Graphics:4.5/5
Sound:5/5
Learning curve:4.5/5
intangibles:4/5
Rating: 
Summary: BEST GAME I'VE EVER PLAYED! EVER!!!!
Review: This is definately the best game I ever played by about 5 miles. The character creation may take a while, but thats a good thing. There are thousands upon thousands of costume choices, dozens of power, origin, and archetype choices. The powers you can change and upgrade, and later get more. In the game, there are hundreds of gangs and orginizations to fight with ranged or melee attacks. If you don't like the controls, you can very easily change them with a simple options menu. The graphics are sweet and the gameplay is awesome. All in all, the best game I have EVER played.
Rating:
Summary: G rated but tons o' fun
Review: City of Heroes has been the best execution of a MMORPG launch that I've ever seen. Many that I've played in the past have been plagued with bugs and connection problems. For all game developers of MMORPG's, the launch is critical in how fast and well word spreads about the game either making or breaking a game in its first 2 months of release. The object of the game after creating a hero is to "arrest" villans throught the city to accumulate experience to advance in level as well as influence points that can be spent on upgrades to skills and abilities. The city is broken up in to multiple suburbs catering to each level of hero then each suburb is further broken down to zones that are color coded to reference the highest and lowest difficulty villians wandering each sect. Characters can be created a choice of "origin" assigns the hero to a sort of guild that affects the types of missions the hero can choose from and which stores they purchase equipment from after the inital levels. You then choose an archetype, which is a class of character being Tank (fighter), Blaster (ranged offensive fighter) etc. After choosing skill sets comes the fun part, creating the gender, look and costume. Capes are currently not available, but the patch that is supposed to arrive soon (June 04) will allow for more variety of costumes as well as additional areas to explore. An expansion pack has already been announced for 2005 called "City of Villans" that will allow a PvP aspect (which currently doesnt exist). The great part about this game is that once you get in to the teen levels, you almost have to go after villans in groups balanced with a good variety of characters (healing, fighting, defense) to succeed. The creaters of CoH have done an excellent job of creating an atmosphere where people can easily group together (unlike many other MMORPG's where its hard to find other people to group with), all you have to do is click the "seek team" button to put yourself on a list to be invited by another group or even check the list and create your own. I've tried to be as brief as possible in describing this game, there is much more to check out if it sounds interesting so far (more info on the game is available from their web site coh dot com).
Rating:
Summary: Very Satisfied Customer
Review: Let me begin by saying, this is my first real stab at the MMORPG, so I really can't judge this against the likes of DAoC, Everquest, Etc... I will just give you my "Newb" Opinion (Note, I am only 7th level so I am obviously not very deep into the game) Likes:
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Character Creation is awesome, and almost unlimited in choices.
Missions are fun and add variety or atleast a reason for all the monster defeating.
City is huge in three dimension, not only can you run for 10min across the city but you can climb (and fly) up to the rooftops.
User base seems to be pretty helpful and friendly. Dislikes:
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Controls are a bit odd but, you can remap most everything to your liking. Basically I am really satisfied with the game. I look forward to getting to play it in my free time.
Rating:
Summary: City of Heroes is the Greatest Out There
Review: I can't get over how many non-comic book fans are buying City of Heroes, then complaining that you won't like it unless you like comic books. This was a game designed by comic book lovers, geared towards comic book lovers! The character design is superb. From the various different power sets at your disposal to the thousands of different physical design combinations at your disposal, City of Heroes truly shines in allowing you to create a truly unique character. The beginning levels are fairly boring. If you have trouble with controls, you can set your own controls via the options panel. The entire control layout is 100% customizable, and the graphics can easily be buffed in the control panel from 50% to 200% resolution. The only limit is your individual graphics card, and it's not the game's responsibility to give you a good card. I recently bought a Radeon 9800 Pro, and my game runs great on 200% graphics. The game truly shines when you begin forming groups around level 6-7. That's when you can venture out from the safety of the two starting levels and really challenge some exciting bad guys. By level 11, you have three major bad-guy havens open to you (The Sewers, Perez Park, and Boomtown), and the game just keeps getting better. The mission levels look the same depending on what you're fighting in. For instance, all wharehouses are essentially the same, as are all office buildings, all sewers, etc. However, the layout of each is randomly oriented. Teaming up is great. I am always the head of my own team, and its fun mixing and matching different hero combinations in your groups. Forming supergroups (which can then tackle task missions) is fun as well. All in all, this game is by-far the best MMORPG I have played. It is on par, in my opinion, with Everquest and Final Fantasy Online.
Rating: 
Summary: still can't play!
Review: We've had this game for about two weeks and we are still not able to play. About 15 different error messages pop up on the screen! I've done everything possible to fix the problem and now new errors are popping up! My husband seems to think that we need a new graphics card. But I know that I am not wasting any more money on this game. I haven't heard anything good about since we've owned it. As far as I can tell the game isn't worth the money or the headache.
Rating: 
Summary: Time to give up
Review: I saw this game over the weekend and had to get it. I had heard of it, but that is about it. I couldn't wait to play. I installed the game Monday evening, created a character, and was off and running. Well...kinda. It took a while to get used to the controls. They are backwards from just about every other game I've played. Moving around just isn't easy. Anyway, I figured, "It's a new game. Give it some time and you'll get used to it." Even as I played more I kept getting 'Target out of range' messages. I would be standing right beside the guy!!! (...). I get home from work Tuesday and jump right to playing. I'm running around Paragon offing bad guys and it wasn't so bad. I got a little perturbed by the monotony of it. How about a little npc flavor? It's the same guys over and over and over. Still, I knew the game had more to offer, so I was hanging in there. Wednesday I got home from work and got to playing. This is when it started to come apart for me. The villians were ALL the same except for their level. Hell, even the layouts inside the buildings were EXACTLY the same. I kept asking myself, "Haven't I finished this mission already?" Still, I hung in there because I hadn't played a team game. Surely a team game would be much more rewarding. Well, I joined a team and we went off into the sewers (finally some new villians!!). BORING - find a group of bad guys, run up, off them, and find next group of bad guys. Why are they always in groups?? Team fights are so bunched up you can hardly tell who is who. We were in the sewers for about 20 minutes and I get a message telling me I've lost my connection to the map server. That was it - kicked from the server. I'm so frustrated with this game because it has SOOOO much potential. This could be the best game in years...could be, but it's not. The character creation is AWESOME and so is the concept. It's the gameplay that sux. Find group, kill group, find next group, kill next...you get the picture. When City of Villians comes out I WILL be back, but until then I won't be playing this at all.
Rating:
Summary: Still trying to get in
Review: I have the game. I'm one of those many who seem to be having trouble with the game. The poster saying check out the forum difficulties is correct. Though the company deletes most folks posts saying they are having problems as fast as they can post them. If you post in the knowledge base support system which is private, they tend to answer. Well eventually. My Problem? Disks are not installing, saying that there is a corruption in the installer. Though I did get a prompt response to my query last night from tech support. Sent them the info requested... Then got back info on how to upgrade drivers for a different video card then mine and how to adjust settings on sound drivers under a different operating system to get the game installed properly. I'm not sure how adjusting my drivers will deal with a corrupt disk error, even if they had my diag's correct. Still waiting to play. I'll update this as I get more info. 12 hours since last contact with a support person, ball is in their court.
Rating:
Summary: Tremendously entertaining
Review: Unlike the anonymous (and often suspiciously similar) negative reviewers above, I have been playing City of Heroes on a near-daily basis since its release (some three weeks as of this writing). In that time, I have been unable to log in exactly once, and disconnected from the map server perhaps twice. Given that this is a massively-multiplayer game, and one that's less than a month old, that's exceptional stability...which is a good thing, because I'm enjoying the heck out of this game. After a few years of EverQuest, I gave up on MMORPGs because they required too much work for too little entertainment. CoH brought me back, largely because I can log on for as little as twenty minutes and still *do* something in the game. Admittedly, at the moment there's little to do other than fight villains. However, most of the non-combat activity in other MMORPGs has, in my experience, just been a tedious and time-consuming way to improve your fighting ability. Rather than spend hour after hour of game time searching the mountains to mine the rocks to gather the ore to smelt the metal to forge the sword so you can fight bad guys more effectively, isn't it more fun to just go out and fight the bad guys without all the rigmarole? It certainly is for my $14.95 a month. As other reviewers have mentioned, character creation is simple and visually stunning. (I do miss capes and wings, but hopefully they'll be available once the developers find a good way to render 20 of them onscreen without destroying frame rates.) The different power sets really *feel* different, and a diverse team of heroes will fill the screen with distinct and appealing special effects. The controls are very simple and easily customizable as long as you read the manual. New content is already planned within the next month, and there will be more to come in the months ahead (including consensual hero-vs-villan PvP in 2005, for those that enjoy that sort of thing). There's no camping, very little kill-stealing, and (in my experience) more willingness to role-play for its own sake than I've seen in other MMOs. And the "sidekick" system is a *brilliant* addition for letting casual players have fun with their hard-core buddies, regardless of the level difference. Is the game perfect? No. Missions can get repetitive, but to me that's just additional incentive to gain in power so I can face new kinds of villains. The interface is occasionally glitchy, but I've never had a serious problem in this regard. And I'd love to have the option of sharing my "friends" list across all my characters on the same server. But in all honesty, most of these complaints are just nit-picking. I've described CoH to my gaming friends as "Everquest, only (A) with superheroes and (B) with all the parts that [stink] removed." If you're at all interested in the superhero genre, and are willing to part with the purchase price, I think you'll be playing this game long after your free month has passed.
Rating:
Summary: Fun Online Game! Looks good, runs great!
Review: I read the reviews of this game before I purchased the game and tend to agree with the positive reviewers. This game is quite fun, and is definitely a good looking game. The graphics DO require a good graphics card, but the game is worth it because its FUN. I have had no compatibility problems, and I have had not any support problems. Technical support resolved my issue within 48 hours and I was sent out on my own to defend Paragon City!
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