City of Heroes’ character creation feature is a double-edged sword. The good thing is that it gives you a basically unparalleled level of freedom in designing your character’s look. Want to be an eight-foot robot with black spandex tights, and an American flag on your chest? Go ahead. Or how about a masked woman with camouflaged hot pants and robot arms? No problem, it’s all you. As long as your grand scheme doesn’t include a cape (the exclusion of which borders on tragic, in a superhero game), you’re free to design it. The versatile character-creation system will, at the very least, allow you to end up with something reasonably close to what you had in mind. The problem is that your looks pretty much have no bearing on how your character will play. Sure, you can say that it’s up to the players to create characters that vibe with what their powers and abilities will ultimately be, but this emphasizes one of City of Heroes’ fundamental flaws: lack of distinction between characters, outside of the purely aesthetic.