City of Heroes was released a few years ago and you can see dUnKle’s original review >here<. But there have been many updates since it was originally released along with a whole new way to play, as a Villain.

City of Villains is pretty much the same as Heroes. You create your Villain out of thousands of items of clothing, colours, shapes and sizes. You can make them look really mean, cute ‘n’ furry or like a famous character. I’ve seen someone who looks like Spawn and even Street Fighter’s Zangief. For 'Villains' Cryptic Studios have added some new classes or ‘Archetypes’:

Mastermind – Masterminds are able to command minions or ‘pets’ to do their bidding, you can choose from Zombies, Ninjas, Robots or Soldiers. So depending on the style of your character you can match it with the pet of your choice.

Stalker - Masters of stealth combat, they can deal high damage but have low hit points, their ability for stealth more than makes up for it.

Dominators – Are much like the Controller class from the Heroes (but can do more damage). Freezing enemies to the spot while attacking them is a great ability to have.

Corruptors - Are like the Blaster Hero type who specialize in Ranged attacks.

Brutes – As you can imagine are the primary hand-to-hand characters in the game, and deal with enemies up close and personal.

The graphics have been improved here and there, the reflections on the water, for instance, are greatly improved as well as other little tweaks. The game now also features support for the Ageia PhysX card which supposedly adds more physics objects on screen as well as takes the strain off the processor, but you have to have the card installed in your computer to take advantage of it.

Expect a retail price of £14.99 / €24.99. The retail package comes with 30-days of free play after which players only need to pay £8.99 per month to have full access to both of the games.