I’m sure many of you are aware that City of Heroes/City of Villains has returned as a play-for-free online game. I was excited when I found out and scoured the internet to find how I could play once more. City of Heroes first launched in North America in April of 2004 followed by the February 2005 release in Europe. City of Villains was released as a stand-alone game on October 31, 2005, allowing players to play as supervillains and two games were officially merged on July 16, 2008.
I, myself, spent many addicted hours playing this game and was there at the final moments of its demise. Many of us were just hanging out in Atlas Park dancing and chatting, waiting for the server to go down. Which it did, at midnight on November 30th, 2012. Many of the true fans of the game felt the hollow space that was left when the game disappeared and sought other forms of entertainment, perhaps moving on to other mass morphs or maybe even reading a book? <gasp>
What made this game so good that people kept talking about it long after it was gone?
Imagine, even though it’s virtual world, you are a super-powered hero or if you chose a super-powered villain. Fighting for what you believe in, completing missions to unlock cool new powers and abilities, or just running around causing mayhem. You could join forces with other players and form Super Groups, with your own headquarters and your own group uniforms and symbols. During the holidays, the programmers would make changes for upcoming festivities with missions and drops reflecting the holiday. Also, a place called Pocket D was introduced where heroes and villains alike could hang out, share a dance, have a drink, even do a little skiing, all with no fighting. If you were a PVP fan, there was even places for that with their own separate missions and goals.
For me, though, the number one thing that made this game so special? Character personalization! There are literally thousands of personalization adjustments you can make to your character. Just to name some of them: height, mass, faces (lots of those), gender, costume color combinations (there is a whole pallet of colors), costume apparel, and most of all power sets. There are many, many power sets to keep all of your imaginations running wild. I know I’d get lost for hours making characters.
But as I started out saying, City of Heroes has returned and now you can play for free. All the things I loved about the game are back and there are no pesky monthly fees. The game returned in April of 2019 as City of Heroes Home Coming. If you want to play, all you need to do is download and install Tequila downloader from http://patch.savecoh.com/tequila.exe for PC users or http://ir.powermad.net/islandrum-mac.zip for MAC users. Once it is loaded, run it but be patient, as there are many files and I know for me it took most of the day before it was finished. But it is well worth the wait.
I, myself, am happy to see the return of City of Heroes and give this old game 4.5 Stars out of 5.
This has been another Reptile’s Random Review.
Awesome News! I played countless hours that I enjoyed with a friend of mine that has sadly passed away since. COH/COV was the game that started my addiction to MMO on my PC I even have a good amount of the comics that they shipped to their subscribers back in the day. Myself like many others would spend hours making our characters look like characters from “licenced” properties and then using the “blackout” mode stealth their costumes so no one else could see what they really looked like. My original addiction is back! Actually that never left that started in 1978 with D&D but my original MMO addiction is BASK JACK!