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City of Villains – Review

Posted on by Strange Realms

4/5

City of Villains is a casual MMO set in a strange world mixed with scifi, modernity, fantasy and horror, where your villain tries to build his place in the criminal world. The surroundings are mostly modern with a touch of scifi, it’s very well done, the graphics are nice and realistic. The rock/industrial music suit very well the settings. The character creation is awesome and you have so many choices to suit your fancy: modern, scifi, machine, fantasy, horror with undead and werewolf to beast. Right from the start, you can work on your character’s bio and motto, and if you play on a RP server you will be able to RP with other players as well since the community is very good. Each class has different options so that means that each player won’t play the same even if they have the same class. The travel skills are really cool.

At first, you do interesting quests in instances but later you get to choose one quest among three quests from the journal so it adds a bit of variety, and sometimes you even get to rob a bank. You get extra XP from playing in group and you can also change the difficulty of the quests you’ve taken. As I said previously, you try to build your place in this criminal world so you mostly fight against other villains, the game is rated Teen after all, so it’s impossible to just attack any NPC. There are touches of dark humor here and there that are funny. Villains can build lairs for their guild but that feature is now available to heroes as well. A crafting aspect was as well later added to the game. Now, when a player buys either side (Heroes or Villains) he gets the other side free when he creates his account so now everyone has access to both games just buy buying one. The Villains side is dirtier, grittier and darker in coloring while the Heroes side is more colorful and clean.

Nothing is perfect in this world, except for cats of course, so City of Villains has to have flaws. The first is the repetitiveness of the maps, once you’ve been inside a building for a quest per exemple, you’ve seen already the only map that is showed when you go inside buildings, it’s pretty much the same for the other maps. The second is the lack of skills, each class gets few skills so you keep using the same skills again and again, and after playing Guild Wars and its hundreds of skills, just using a few skills all the time is lame. I also heard that while the first 20 levels are casual, the other levels get grindier so it,s harder to level up.<

The game is perfect for casual players who have always dreamed to play and RP a villain, the game is fun and funny with a good community.

The official website: http://www.cityofheroes.com/

This is a past blog entry from my gaming blog on Multiply.

LOTRO and CoV

Posted on by Strange Realms

I’ve never had interest into CoH, thought playing a superhero in a MMO would probably be lame but I thought I’d play the villain version though. Sounds like they listened to a lot of people’s prayers because the villain version came out and I ended up playing it.

CoX is a breeze of fresh air among all those fantasy MMO and being in that modern/scifi environment is fun. Sure you can create supernatural characters of course, from zombies, demons to werewolves, but the surroundings are modern. The character customization is amazing and I must have spent at least an hour creating each of my character. I was surprised to discover that the community was mature and all and I even got the opportunity to RP. CoV’s graphivs are better than CoH and the cities are dirty and the music is really rock. It looks really nice. You get all those weird powers. There is a lot of dark humor in it as well.

I managed to find a good SG and even good friends, one in particular I was RPing a lot with. We were making death threats to each other, it was funny. You get to write your characters’ bio and it’s great to bump into players who take the time to read your bio and act accordingly, and even make jokes about your character.

I’d say the downside is the repetiveness. All the maps are the same, in particular the inside of the buildings.

I was checking out Tabula Rasa too and at some point it looked like it was going to come out so I cancelled my subscription to CoV. I ended up not liking TR later. Anyway, it was a good thing because there were hard moments at that point and I really needed every cent I could save.

Since I get my fantasy fix with GW, I wanted something different as second game, like CoV, or TR. As I said, I was checking out Tabula Rasa, I wanted to be in the beta and so in order to get more experiences in beta I subscribed to other betas including LOTRO. I never checked out LOTRO before. As strange as it may seems, I’m never interested into MMOs based on an IP. I’ve loved Stargate very much but I do not plan to ever play the game, I’m just sick tired now personally of the show and I wish that instead of making a remake (Stargate Altantis), that the producers would come up with a genuine scifi show instead with a new story and background, etc. I do not plan to play either Stars Wars, or Star Trek Online, or Matrix Online, etc. While I do love the LOTR movies, love the book and read other Tolkien books as well (Bilbo, Silmalirion, etc.), I’ve never payed attention to LOTRO. I was chosen to be in its beta thought.

I got tons of problems trying to download the LOTRO client so I was a bit pissed off when I started playing the beta. Still, I’ve fallen slowly but surely in love with LOTRO. I’m not saying the game is without faults but it has so many good things in it. The graphics are beautiful, beside the characters who are a bit awkward I admit; the world is living; the quests are well done and engrossing; the storyline makes me feel as if suddenly I’m in GW, meaning that you’re part of the storyline, not player #23455; it really feels as if you live there and with the housing now it just makes the feeling true; RPing in it is great with a mature community, etc.

I have to admit that lately I’ve started to feel a CoV itch, a desire to go back in it and have fun RPing as a villain and rob banks. The thing though is that I can’t really afford more than one subscription game at once and I really do not want to leave LOTRO that I love dearly. What to do now?

This is a past blog entry from my gaming blog on Multiply.