CoH Animal Pack

(Hey, look! A live post! Treat it gently kids — you don’t want to scare it off!)

So of course I purchased the new Animal Pack for City of Heroes. NCSoft makes it so seductively easy …

And what did I get for my $10?

Well, I guess I got my $10 worth. It’s neither as lame as I might have feared, nor as cool as it might have been.

The basic costume piece additions — the whole purpose of the upgrade — are okay. Two sizes of cat heads (ferocious, not cuddly), with some variations for tigers, lions, etc., and for patterning and a couple of ear styles and for (optional) sabre-teeth. A new wolf’s head (not the kind of mutant werewolf style previous available) with some variants. Additional tiger striping. Minotaur heads, with three different styles of horns (plus hornless) and four (!) styles of nose rings.

There are bird heads, too — eagle, hawk, vulture. Cue the Egyptian costumes …

They’ve also added cat feet and bird feet for the monstrous feet costume slots, and a minotaur tail and shaggy wolf tail.

What’s there is good, though the heads feel too small in proportion. Of course, the human heads sometimes feel a bit small on normal bodies. The effect is worse with the monstrous lower body, which still looks monstrously large/long compared to the rest of the form. I did a little experimentation, and the minotaur on the huge body doesn’t look bad.

(Apparently in the UK the pronounce minotaur with a long I — my-notaur — as opposed to the short I we use here in the States. Ran across that the other day on TV. Weird.)

Another new costume feature are some animal-specific auras. I didn’t play with the “fleas” aura, but there’s a beastly anger one that you can focus on different body parts (including breath), perpetually or just in combat. You know how bulls have that stereotypical steamy breath? Yeah, you can do that with your minotaur.

There are some nice costume change emotes.

I did not get a chance to play with the beastly running power. I’m hoping it’s as good as the Champs Online one.

So, is it a huge game changer? Nah. I don’t see Paragon (et al.) being overrun by cat girls or minotaurs or wolf-men, though it’s nice that there are now those options for those who want them. I may retrofit a couple of my feline characters to use the new heads, but not in all cases. And there are a lot of other possibilities here — I (or Lady Zebra) would love to see a horse head, for example, and certainly a monkey/gorilla would be used by some.

Good fun. Now if I can carve out some time to play for the next few weeks …