Have you ever felt the call of spandex and capes, if so the City of Heroes just might be the game for you. Based around the idea of super heroes and villains, the budding spandex addict can fight to their hearts content.

City of Heroes: Going Rogue is the new expansion pack for this MMORPG which adds a fully functional Praetoria City.

My first impressions were not great as the client took over twelve hours to download, as I sat there, I’m thinking this had better be awesome. So it’s a game based on super heroes, specifically you play the hero, or if you choose villain. So finally the thing downloads and boots up and you’re presented with the initial start up screen.

Now names are a difficulty as, let’s face it, most of the good one have already been taken. So, you have a good ten minutes trying to think of one that has not already been used, not as easy as it sounds, especially as no one wants to be a super being known as wert55. The biggest choice you have at this juncture is to pick your class and design your costume.

Costume design is very personal and the designers appear to have taken this on board as, although not infinite, the options are varied enough to create some really special costumes. So you have your name, basic abilities and costume, time to join the fun. Normally when you have to review these things it's a pig's job to get on a server, but not so with City, as most of the slots had no one in them, this may mean that tons of room has been allocated, but in truth it looks like not many people are playing the game.

Once inside the city you have the inevitable training scenario, which consists of small missions. One of the individual aspects of the game is the moral choices which you make. You may think that this will determine your role as villain or hero, but as the game reminds you, you can change sides.

The environment is well realised and you interact with the in-game characters and other players via a text box. Well, I say "players", in truth I only saw one other individual. Your first moral choice comes quickly when you are sent to infiltrate the resistance, only to have the opportunity to either kill him or rescue him. It’s not really much of a choice, you can either be the upholder of the law for an apparent tyrant, or be swayed by the resistance's anger at not having everyone in the city carrying a gun.

The game looks good, though after a while you realise that it’s not as varied as it could be having a number of generic environments which are overused. It also looks like it could be a lot of fun, if enough people were playing, to create superhero teams, to take on the bigger villains. However, I found that the control interface was not intuitive and worse still the whole thing played in some strange jerky fashion as if it was dropping frames all the time. Now I have a high end machine and a decent broadband connection and never experienced such a difficult time in controlling my character on any other online game.

The lack of other characters, limited environments, poor control interface and rotten frame rate means that I personally would not play this game for very long. Had the game been smooth and easier to control then this might have enticed me.

However, the game has been running for some years so it’s fair to say that there may have been something amiss with my twelve hour download. There is a free trial version available to try out, so if you’re into superheroes it might be worth checking out.

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Charles Packer