City of Villains is a great game, but it is not fundamentally all that different from City of Heroes. There is a fine line between good and evil, and in this case who is on which side has a lot to do with who has the most skulls on their costume and the most garbage in their streets.cov infamy Everything in City of Villains looks ominous, dirty, or just generally evil, but in its heart of hearts it is a dark mirror of City of Heroes.
Less immediately noticeable, but far more important, is the fact that over the course of the last year Cryptic has evidently learned a lot about crafting zones. The new areas in City of Villains Infamy are not only visually stunning, but brilliant in their use of space and the scripting of their mobs and NPCs. Especially when compared to earlier works like the Hollows and the Shadow Shard. If there is one shortcoming it is the comparative lack of contacts in the early game. Where City of Heroes offered several initial paths and assortments of missions, City of Villains Infamy offers only one course for the early levels spent in Mercy Isle, and the missions quickly become tiresome when starting new characters.
It is a pretty orderly chaos, and bad guys continue to take missions from contacts rather than rampaging through the city mugging pedestrians and setting kittens on fire at whim. For all the talk of villains being proactive and heroes being reactive, this is mostly all a matter of presentation rather than gameplay differences. Once all the trappings and narrative are stripped away there is really little difference between a rescue mission and a kidnapping.
None of that is necessarily a bad thing.cov infamy It just needs to be said that those expecting a wildly different gameplay experience will be disappointed. Those who expect to play City of Heroes with a darker setting, evil looking characters and a meaner narrative will love it. It is good to be bad.