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22 Jun 2014 - 6 Jul 2014
Lex Luthor has come from the future to warn against an attack by Braniac. As a last-ditch effort to defeat the alien threat, Luthor has co-opted some of Braniac's technology and spread it among the world population. This is the origin story of your hero, as you fight as either a hero or villain in the DC universe.
My main problem is one of a restricted perspective. I loved City of Heroes, and I played it from it's first public beta to the day it went offline. This ... is no City of Heroes.
And that's OK. It's somewhere between Champions and City of Heroes, and that's not an easy line to walk. There are no turn-based battles, here: you're encouraged to go full-out during your fights, stringing together combos and tackling ten or so bad guys at a time. It's a lot like a modern action game, where there are an infinite number of mooks for you to fight, and a flimsy story to hang it all on.
It's actually a pity that the story seems to take so much precedence, really. There's a lot of times when well-known heroes and villains will interject, and you have to just stand there and listen to them. Usually, you can press a key to get out of the cutscene, and thus get right back into the action, but there are also long stretches of travel to your next objective when you really don't have anything else to do *but* listen.
Don't get me wrong; the voice acting is actually pretty good, as far as massively multiplayer games go. But it's largely unnecessary, I feel. Most of the writing actually goes out if it's way to make sure you know you're never, ever going to get on the same level as anyone on the main cast. It's not you that takes out the bad guy; it's Flash, or Superman, or Zatanna, or whoever you're supposedly "working with" to defeat the villain of the day. You're not even a second-stringer in the Justice League; you're just someone who's kinda helping out.
Never mind that you have to clear the way to the main boss by yourself, with the main hero coming in only during the climax. All the grunt work, and no glory. At least the Oracle knows who you are and what you've done, but that's about it. Which kind of makes it worse when, after foiling the villain's plans, they are (by and large) allowed to get away!
I'm sorry; I'm still stuck on that. Why, oh why, did Flash not stop Gorilla Grodd? Fastest man alive, my shiny metal ass!
...
Anyway.
Character customization is nice, but feels a lot more limited than City of Heroes. I have no doubt that's rectified with all of the paid DLC, but I can't quite bring myself to plop down the requisite ... what is it up to now? One hundred dollars? Two hundred? There has been quite a lot of it. If there's ever a bundle price, I might buy it and play for a little while longer, but I suspect the amount of DLC is going to radically outstrip my future budget.
The naming system seems a little broken, somehow. Before I started recording, I was able to register a hero named "Blue Bandana" with no issues, but, during the video, I couldn't seem to make a hero with any kind of special character in their name, even with a single space. Maybe I'm just really bad at making hero names that haven't already been taken a hundred times. I do remember referring to a website for inspiration, back in the day.
I really want to recommend this game. And, as it's one of the few games that lets you be a super, I can at least recommend giving the free-to-play part of the game a shot. But whether or not to buy any of the DLC - or even becoming a paid subscriber - is up to you.