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Super Villains always lose...but this time, this means YOU.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 21
Date: November 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

How was City of Villains designed? Start by loading up the City of Heroes game engine, then begin the long and tedious creative process:
1) Change the word "rescue" to "kidnap".
2) Change the word "retrieve" to "steal".
3) Change the word "hero" to "villain".
4) Release an overpriced collector's edition, and a soon-to-be bargain bin standard version.
5) Count your money, and laugh, laugh, laugh.

What you, the player, do in this game doesn't count as villainy in any way, shape, or form.

As with most MMORPGs, you will spend the vast amount of your time on the leveling treadmill. But what is it that your "villain" will fight? Why gangsters, trolls, evil snakemen, and renegade heroes turned baddies! The same thing you would fight if you were a hero!

In City of Heroes, civilians cower in the streets at the hands of thugs, and thank you for rescuing them. In City of Villains the thugs chase you down in the street, and the civilians walk by you without so much as a whisper of terror. Civilians are invulnerable, so you won't be robbing them or beating them up, nor will they "tremble at the mention of your name." Meanwhile, the street thugs see you as just another costume to be chased down, regardless of how quickly you will dispatch them or your supposed lack of morals.

You might say, "Hey, this game is rated Teen, its not meant to show the real side of criminality and violence!" To which I respond, "Exactly! This game has no point! It's a poorly conceived, huge waste of time!"

This game is basically a PvP patch that masquerades as a totally new game. Regardless of the claims to the contrary, it DOES NOT STANDALONE - It is the shadow of City of Heroes and thus it is devoid of substance and depth.

Absolutely horrible.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 26
Date: January 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Cheating: The administrators of the game cheat for certain players and are don't enforce their own in-game rules unless more than 5 people complain.

Gameplay: The game is designed so that it takes forever to level, literally weeks for one level after level 20 (max is 50).

Performance: The game itself is highly intrusive, uses incredible amounts of memory, cpu, hard-disk space (4+gigs) and has many known issues with most graphics cards.

Harassment: There is a lot of solicitation for joining various supergroups, a lot of unwanted invitations. Many people run around asking you for sex on this game if you play a female character.

FEES: There is virtually NO technical support. It costs $15 per month to play this game, even after you buy it. Most people know this, but I do know one person who bought this game without realizing that.

Bottom line: World of Warcraft is MUCH better. Heck, Warcraft III/TFT is better than this.

this game is bad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 29
Date: November 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

in WOW you can level up get armor and stuff like that, but in this game you only get powerthingies and your gudged by your looks and power thingies. i would strongly recomend to play WoW
instead of CoV

City of Villians

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 7
Date: September 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

NC Soft the company that runs the game is a bunch of idiots.I bought the game and used the free trial peroid to check it out .
I decided I liked it so I paid for three months of game time.
After that I never could log on , after several weeks of e-mails with the company I gave up , there idiots asking me questions like are my cap locks off. I'll never buy antoher NC soft product again.

Doesnt Work

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 7
Date: October 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game disappointed me. I downloaded it and finally set up my account and then I created a really awesome character which took me an hour and a half to look through all the details. [horns,masks,suits,claws,powers,origins etc.] and then I pressed enter the rogue isles and the bottom half of my screen just freezes and the light effects make the top all blurry so I try a couple more times and I never got it to work. I contacted the tech support for the site and they just want me to run a diagnostic test and i dont know what the heck that is so I still havent become a villain...

It takes awhile to see... but a poorly executed expansion.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: January 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Well, it has been out for awhile and I have played through it a bit and suffice to say... this game is dead. It should have been a new entity alongside City of Heroes but for all it's flash it is just more of the same. The missions are EXACTLY the same as the hero side of the game...sometimes with just minor word changes.

You play through the game and contacts tell you what a big shot you are becoming.. then in the late 30 levels all your contacts act like you are a nobody. That sort of inconistant story telling and pacing are just small complaints.

Big complaint, lack of anything to do but the same tired four or five mission templates. That is right, there is a small handful of missions... and you will be doing them over and over and over and over. Soloing is boring and group play is risky thanks to no solid group dynamic.

PVP? PvP is a joke. A few powers destroy everything else making it zero fun. If you enter a PvP zone and have no resistance to status effect (ie holds, sleeps, etc) you are pretty much a doomed. They say upper level content is coming but they never even came up with decent upper level content for City of Heroes (the general response was "make a new character", and that means the same grind all over)... so save your money, this MMO is starting it's descent (again).

On the positive side, it does have one of the most fun combat systems for an MMO and an impressive character design system. These were positives from City of Heroes... so it is not like they would downgrade that.

It didn't WoW me

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 14
Date: January 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I was looking to take a break from world of warcraft and decided to give city villains a try... 2 weeks later I reactivated my warcraft account. I found the CoV gameplay to be extremely repetitive and chaotic. I also found the amount of supergroup/team spammed invites without so much as a 'hey' in-game tell to be infinitely bothersome. Maybe under different circumstances I could have enjoyed it - but it just didn't match up to world of warcraft... If I need to repetitevely kill the same things over and over and over again, I'd like to at least do it in a game where I can always move to a different setting and refresh the experience.

This game COULD be so much more. . . .

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: March 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I'm really very sad tonight. I allowed my subscription to lapse on City of Heroes/City of Villains. I felt that I had no other option. My wife and I play computer games together, and we originally enjoyed both CoH and CoV. Unfortunately, NCSoft is not living up to their end of the bargain. While City of Villains offered new character classes (most obviously, the Mastermind class), there is a lack of polish that accompanies this game. Consider the following: Several of the contacts throughout the game do not function properly; frequently, when you enter a mission, one or more members of your party (when you're grouping) may not be able to see the enemies--this is particularly frustrating when you're playing a mastermind who has SIX henchmen whom you've spent several minutes upgrading with TWO upgrades--your only option in this case is to leave the mission [your troops disappear], reenter, and start all over again; also, my wife, a good friend, and I have all encountered a bugged mission that put impossibly difficult enemies on a mission (we could NOT progress until we finished this mission with these characters, so their development was arrrested)--this was the final straw for me, as I sent "bug reports" [five of them, to be precise] reporting this problem and asking for it to be addressed, all to no avail (I NEVER received any responses to any messages). Now, if this were a "free" game after purchasing the original package, that would be unfortunate; I won't tolerate this lack of response from someone with whom I'm paying for monthly service.

I believe that NCSoft has a pretty good idea for their game, but they would do well to get their collective acts together and PAY ATTENTION to the paying customers. They need to spend some serious time fixing all the bugs that are currently driving people away.

Know what you are getting

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 20
Date: November 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I purchased both the deluxe (which I also reviewed) and the regular version of this game. I've spent hours now with friends from City of Heroes exploring it. My husband is enjoying some of it, as are a few of our friends, but I feel more and more that I wasted money. This game is very much a matter of taste. Parents with younger teens especially should know what they are buying their children if they purchase this game. I know many people will think "Oh, come on, it's only a game", but games reflect and affect how we think. Games have been used for centuries to teach, not just skills, but behaviors and attitudes. NO, I don't think kids will run out and start robbing banks because of a video game. I do think they will develop an idea that stealing (or other anti-social behaviors) might be fun.

First, I must say the game does play about as well as the original, especially now that patches are in place. Many graphical improvements appeared for both games. Other improvements are CoV only, such as additional options in costume design. I did have fun designing evil looking characters and running around the lower levels fighting new enemies. New character options, new archtypes, a visually interesting world -- that's all present. There is a lot to tempt someone from City of Heroes into getting the game and the combined account, especially with the two-for-one price structure.

The game offers player vs the computer and player vs player. If you want to stick to just robbing banks, kidnapping people, killing other bad guys and such, your areas of operation are somewhat limited. If you want to actively hunt and kill other players, you can go into the PvP areas.

My major objections are completely personal for me and others may not have the same feeling. I can't get behind the ideas in the game. City of Heroes was a positive experience, something to feel good about. City of Villians, in keeping with its "dark side" ideas, promotes all the nastiness a human can produce. AFter playing for a while, I found I was angry, vengeful, and thinking about how I could hunt down so-n-so (other players) and pound his face into the ground. After about two week of playing, my enthusiasm wore off completely and turned to distaste as I thought about what kinds of activities I was emulating. Did I really want to spend my time and energy this way? At least in the hero world, I could feel I'd accomplished something, however imaginary, and I'd had fun with my friends online. In CoV, turning on your "friends" is part of the game. There is even one zone where heroes are pitted against heroes to gain objects of destructive power. I deleted all my villainous characters and decided I would not play anymore.

There were other options with CoV that came into CoH I was still looking forward to, and that was mostly concerning the development of super bases. If you've played other MMORGS, you probably grasp the idea of game economy and the value of making things and having your own "place" in the game world. Well, after 3 weeks of experimentation with this, all I can say is...very poor job. The rules and costs for creation take the whole thing beyond challenging and difficult to "why do you even want to bother with this?" Again, it all hinges on the PvP aspect. If you don't want to raid other players, there's not a lot of point in a base. If you do, there is prohibitive cost involved and your supergroup will need to be successful, constant raiders. But don't worry, it will be at least 6 months before you can even consider it, because you can't make and buy everything you need for a while yet. The developers will need either to make major changes or simply state that they never intended very many people to manage having a base.

I have many friends who were looking to put CoV under their Christmas trees, and I'm now advising them to think it over carefully. If you like player vs player action and all that it entails, then, yes, City of Villains is just what you want. If you aren't sure or don't think so, then save your money.

City of Villains - More of the same

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: May 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

City of Villains introduces the darker aspect of the superhero world to the universe started by City of Heroes. Players can assume the role of villainous juggernauts and terrorise Paragon City. This game also introduces the first real player-versus-player fighting, since player heroes can now fight player villains in special city zones.

Initially the new characters that are available to villains are very fun and interesting, but mostly so because they are new. Eventually these new classes and powers fail to entertain because the underlying game is still the same. The mission system is practically the same with a few modifications and the missions are hardly different from those in City of Heroes, save the intent. The style of fighting is altered a bit with an interesting-but-insignificant rage buildup system. This is not a big problem if the game's style of play is fun for you, but for those that are hoping for new and exciting content, this isn't it.

City of Villains is a fine game technically and should bring great entertainment to hardcore players, but it lacks in originality.

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