Blood of Heroes is the long hard work of many people dedicated to keeping MEGS or (Mayfair's Exponential Gaming System) alive. Sadly perhaps they have done a great disservice to a fine system.
The MEGS system is elegant and simple, roll two d10's add them together and beat a target number derived from a comparison chart, doubles add together but elicit another roll--completely open ended as long as doubles are rolled. Simple and Elegant, the system is great for high-powered supers. Sadly MEGS has always been too grainy to show the fine distinctions between relatively "normal humans", this is usually acceptable in superheroes a sacrifice of fine detail at the low end for a good level of detail at the superheroic end.
PC creation is point based with the base level being 450 points, which looking at DC Heroes the progenitor to Blood of Heroes is considered "Beginning Robin Level" not very high for a game that's greatest distinction is high power. This was not a great flaw in DC Heroes where quite a few Heroes did fall near enough to the "450 level" to be examples on par with the heroes, it is however one of the huge bloody gaping flaws of Blood of Heroes Edition of MEGS--where only a handful of NPC's are under 1000 points. MEGS is good for High Powered gaming, but BOH simply shoves PC down at the lowest level of superhero-dom and then flaunts its HIGH Point NPC's which are integral to the setting of BOH.
What good can I say of the setting--I am reminded by the old adage "If you can't say anything good don't say anything at all" but for a review I cannot simply ignore 130 or so pages of the rulebook. Imagine if you will for me the poorest comic origin you can with Atlantis, Alien planets and Godlike entities--write it down and offer it to Pulsar games, because it sure as heck will be better than the "official" one. It is by far the poorest conceived universe for a superhero game I've ever seen. Not to mention overpowered--yes even for MEGS which is good at that kind of thing I find the NPC's the worst--unless of course you're fond of munchkinism in the universe. Not only are the point values high, but they add benefits to the powers and abilities of some NPC's that no sane GM would allow, stretching powers beyond the framework of MEGS and more terribly setting a precedent for those with munchiness in their blood to follow suit. Superheroes are about power, about being more than human and doing fantastic things, but within certain frameworks which keep the genre sane. Blood of Heroes Universe is anything but sane or even well-concieved--even the NPC's names are stale and unimaginative. That is pretty common in superhero-dom and would be forgivable if they were actually in some way cool names.
The book's layout is unattractive reminding me all too much of the Champions 4th Ed Blue Book with small dense text and flat gray boxes providing only minimal variance. It is readable but not very satisfying in the midst of all the graphics heavy game design of this century. The art in the book is sparse throughout, which is its only saving grace--the best of the art is barely passable for amateur published games.
Overall the changes from MEGS found in DC Heroes 3rd is minimal,a few fixes, nothing a good GM couldn't come up with on her own, the so called "power creation rules" are nice but amount to less than 4 pages of material and says basically "find something similar and use that cost modified by X,Y,Z," if you have ANY version of the MEGS system after DC Heroes First Edition, then you don't need this book. If you don't have a copy of the MEG's system, look for a copy of DC Heroes 2E or 3E or even the "Batman RPG" *(MEGS version1.5 or so) if you can have any of them for less than 30.00 buy that instead.
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