City of Heroes (Prima's Official Strategy Guide)

 (16 customer reviews)

Prima's relationship with game companies often allows them great access to the innards of game development during alpha and beta testing, which usually leads to some useful insights in their guides. Unfortunately, that's not the case here. While the combat section of this guide is fairly well detailed, the meat of the game is in character development where this book fails with poor research and outright errors.The good news is that there's good use to this book if you're wandering around Paragon City, the City of Heroes base. Creature factions are very well described, with useful tidbits on how to fight them. For instance, two melee fighters shouldn't simultaneously attack a Circle of Thorn (COT) mage as the mage will self destruct, likely killing both fighters. It's hard to tell this simply by playing the game. Geography and combat tricks are also well described.Unfortunately, the character development section has some problems. First, its readily apparent that many of...Read more

It's always hard for a publisher to create a guide for an ever-developing MMO like City of Heroes. However once again Prima has decided to make a quick buck by releasing a guide that was outdated a day after the game's launch.

The majority of the information is from the beta days of CoH, and there are plenty of typos and misinformation strewn throughout. For newbies, the Zone maps are fine, as are the character generation guides.

However none of the information is very "deep". It provide basic stats for an enemy, which is usually incorrect in some fashion or another. The guide lists arch villians but doesn't give you any idea where or how to find them. It tells you how to start Task Forces or certain Quests but gives you no help on solving them.

Most of the text for the mobs and areas is lifted straight from the game itself, with little commentary from the editors. There are no handy cross referenced charts for mobs. There isn't even an...Read more

Poorly constructed guide. On the one hand, it has all the basics you might expect; character development details, zone details, and enemy details. They also include some useful tips and a whole chapter on why copying trademark characters is bad taste (hey its they're book, there allowed the occasional tangent).However it was way too obvious that each power, as well as some of the enemies, was researched by different authors. You may be reading about one power for an archetype that is described well, turn the page to the next power and find it poorly described. In addition they have obvious errors in the book. For example they mention a supergroup vault, which COH designers have told me directly doesn't exist.All in all, this is book was obviously slapped together much like a frat kids research paper. Shameful for a proffesional game guide company.