Everyone has read comic books at one time or another. Some of us have even kept or keep massive collections of comics as they are printed and most comic book collectors have a favorite character that they tend to keep up with. Heroes Unlimited gives the players that chance to actually become a part of the story of their favorite super hero (or the player's personal version of said hero) or even create something totally new to play as a hero.

Comic books have so many things offered as super powers and often a super hero will have many powers or even NO super powers (like Batman). My favorite hero has always been Spider-man, yet when I started playing this game I chose to create a new type of hero, one that was never the same after each time he went to sleep. I got the idea from Roger Zelazny's character The Sleeper in Wild Cards series of books.

Like the comics, the game allows for almost anything you can think of to be used as a hero's "power". The powers could have resulted from an experiment that went wrong (or right, Green Goblin), robots that the character created and controls (Deathlock), bionics (Cyborg), special training (Batman), being born a mutant (X-men), physical training (Robin/Nightwing), magic (Dr. Strange), hardware (The Punisher), or even being an alien (Superman). Yet while the comics have become the basis for this game to be created, they do not limit it in any way!

The 350+ basic rules book has just about everything that a player will ever need to create a character. All the different powers are here as well as detailed explanations of what each one does. Some heroes don't really have super powers, they are just well trained with hi-tech equipment. In these cases, the character has many skills that the normal person would not have the ability or chance to learn in the first place. All of these skills and items of equipment are right here in this well organized rules book.

The book is indexed and cross referenced to make finding the rules you need a snap. Not to mention that the 2nd Edition update has brought the older format of the game into the present so that it uses all the same rules, skills and equipment as any of the other 2nd Edition games or Rifts.

About the only thing I found wrong with this volume was that many of the common items that a person would find in the cities of today (hand guns and other current weapons for today's level of technology) are strangely left out of the book. The reason given for this is that Palladium has a separate volume called The Compendium of Contemporary Weapons (see my review of this excellent product, there is a link to it on my profile page) which contains everything you will ever need for this game. Since the basic rules book is already so large that it was difficult to keep the price affordable, Palladium Books felt it would be better to leave the bulk of modern weapons in that other volume. I tend to agree with them because adding another 200 pages to this book would have made it ungainly and hard to use.

Once more, Palladium Books has managed to produce a superior product in the face of the other, well established big companies and pull it off. The cost for each book is less, fewer books are needed to play the game, and the overall experience is better. You don't even have to learn a new rules system because all of the Palladium Games use the exact same basic rules. Only the setting changes as you move from one game to the next. If you are into super hero games, be sure to check this one out. You can only come out ahead by getting the base book.

Recommended: Yes