Game Thoughts: Multiversus (Patreon)

I've been collecting my thoughts on Multiversus through its first week, but so far, they are quite mixed.

It has some really nice art and music. They do a great job of making some very disparate characters look like they can exist together. It feels like those Scooby-Doo crossover episodes. Yeah, Shaggy and Batman and the Harlem Globetrotters clearly don't come from the same franchise originally, but they can meet up and it's not too jarring. The music in the Bat Cave stage is just so great. It's sometimes the Animated Series and sometimes a riff on the Nolan movies and I'm always happy when that stage comes up. Even the "epic" remix of the Rick and Morty theme is actually really fun. The team knocked it out of the part with the art side of the game.

The same cannot be said for the lousy, clunky UI/UX. It seems to be made for a mouse because it absolutely sucks with a controller. To change options, you scroll with the world's slowest scroll bar and until they made some changes, there was a control option I had to toggle off/on depending on which character I was using and it was a chore. It just isn't clear what buttons you can and can't use the first times you play. For example, after a match, the rematch button is lit up and shows you can press Square, but Leave doesn't have a button. Turns out you can press Right and activate Leave so now you can use Square to select it but Accept was still highlighted. Why not make one option Square and the other Circle? Like, ya know, almost every other game? Your first sessions also have an intrusive tutorial that makes it look like you're going to have control but then suddenly a new pop-up appears and control is yanked away from you. Having to set your perks before every match slows things down so much that I would rather see them just remove the whole system rather than only improve the UI.

Gameplay as well doesn't seem great. They ran a pretty lengthy beta and this thing seemed like it was in production for a while, so there's a lot you look at just wonder "Why?". Attack priorities are way off to the point that you just have to accept it. Easily spammable moves can take priority over attacks that take more planning. And that's coupled with hitboxes that just don't make sense. It's great watching a sword pass through a character's head and they take no damage or your opponent clearly whiffs and you go flying. Superman can just straight-up hit characters behind him. There are bigger videos online that break down just how terrible it really is, but it destroys any hope I had to take the game remotely seriously. Until this is improved/fixed, the game is nothing more than a way to kill a few minutes.

There are a few other big issues that really sap my enjoyment of the game:

The game's performance is all over the place. The first times I played it, everything moved and felt like a clunky mess. Then I played it another day and it was super smooth and gameplay moved at a zippy pace and I enjoyed it. Every time after that has been somewhere in the middle. It doesn't feel great but it's no longer actively terrible.

A lot of the characters just aren't fun to play as. I discounted most of the cast because of their property, which speaks to a big problem in a property driven game, and the ones I'm willing to play as all have two or three things that really bug me. I started out as Superman but trying to get his Up and Forward specials to register seem like a roll of the dice and his Down Special seems so useless that I dropped him. Wonder Woman is... good. Shaggy is your generic Ryu but I don't like how much delay all his moves have and WW is towards that generic side but her moves are a bit snappier so I'm willing to play as her. Batman is fine too. He moves well but the grapple seems really inconsistent and he loses basic attacks due to cooldowns. Harley Quinn has been pretty fun. She moves like Batman without the projectile penalty and her trap specials aren't great but they're good to catching people off guard or protecting your back.

Other than those big things, I mostly just have a litany of medium complaints. Nothing breaks the game but a lot of it is just annoying:

It acts like it's online even fighting bots, so you have to wait on most of the same timers and suffer the same performance hits.

When I started playing I couldn't buy characters or use the “toast” feature (which had a mission tied to it).  The interface just immediately closed itself when I opened it. This went away on the second day and I was able to unlock a new character and toast, which turned out to just be a version of saying "Good game" that they monetize with its own currency. Weird.

The stages are very plain. They're the "Omega" versions of Smash Bros stages where everything feels like a remix of Battlefield. I want some really special stages with neat gimmicks. Where are the Rainbow Ride, Pokefloats, and Big Blue stages? The stages are so similar and limited in number, that there's usually a feeling of “oh, this stage again?”.

Most of the special moves are just awful. They take too long to come out, they're easily stuffed, they don't really do much damage.

There are a bunch of status effects like freezing, being stuck in goo, changing stats, Velma makes people's heads big and the game doesn't really explain what that means. I'm sure the status effects are all bad but you can't really notice the difference a level 4 Ignite or broken bone has versus a level 1 so I mostly just played the same either way. The only noticeable one is Frozen, which drops your movement speed, but that one is so vastly overpowered that it seems like the only one worth using.

A few sound effects sound like they're directly ripped off from Smash Bros. Getting a KO from spiking an enemy down or the sound of picking up an item are just way too similar.

You can't use the Dpad to move. I find this incredibly annoying and the zone for what the game considers an Up+Special rather than a Forward+Special is super strict at times. The Gamecube controller has restrictor gates so it was very easy to make sure you always did the move you intended.

There are  a ton of cosmetics but going through all the menus is a pain and so many of them are ugly that I just kind of blocked them out from the start. You're given a Space Kook icon in your first session and I kind of don't see me changing that, so I have written off most of their monetization.

Batman has a projectile as a normal but it has a cooldown on it and he just... can't do a neutral normal until the cooldown is up. Make the Batarang a special and give the man a generic punch or something. It makes him not fun to play as and it means you have to constantly listen to the "Batarang isn't ready" audio lines while trying to fight.

You're punished for repeating moves, even normals, and put in a weakened state. But since so many of the characters' specials don't work well or are just bad, I don't have a full rotation of moves to ensure I'm always using fresh attacks. Punishing people for spamming specials sounds fine but normal attacks is ridiculous. Couple that with Batman losing a normal if his Batarang is on cooldown and I'm almost always in a weakened state with him.

Multiversus is enough like Smash Bros that you want to play it that way, but everything is a bit... off.

You can't charge forward smashes. If you're trying to prevent somebody from returning to the platform after knocking them away, since you can't charge forward, you can only hit them up or down, so it doesn't matter that they burned their forward special trying to get back to the stage.

And hitting them down rarely works because it's actually kind of hard to get downward ring outs in this game. As long as you can reach the side of the platform (not just the ledge), you can infinitely wall jump back onto the stage. Spike hits at high percentages are the only downward ringouts I've gotten.

Because it's so easy to get back to the stage and the penalty for using normals frequently, stocks last a lot longer than in Smash.

You can't throw.

Items are limited to only the free-for-all mode. The 1v1 and 2v2 modes feel pretty stale with the small roster, low number of really similar stages, and no items, so I lean towards wanting to play the FFA mode, but most of your missions and upgrades and rewards are centered around winning matches. It only counts as a win if you're in first place, so even coming in second in FFA counts as a loss and you don't make any progress on missions, so 1v1 matches are the only reliable way to make progress.

Multiversus feels like it does the free to play fighting game monetization well enough. There are rotating sets of characters you can play for free, you get one permanent character for free, you earn enough currency to unlock a second permanent character for completing all the tutorial quests, and you can try all the characters in the training mode before you buy them.

But if you ARE looking to spend, holy crud everything is super expensive. It's $7 to buy a character (and of course you can only buy money in $5 or $10 packs so you have to overspend) and it's $15 for a different costume. A different outfit is twice as expensive as a character. Comparatively, the battle pass offers a ton of value but only if you care about those specific characters and are willing to spend hours grinding, usually playing as fighters you don't want to use. The top prize on the free pass is an ugly costume for Finn and a the top prize on the paid pass is a good costume for Jake. I don't like either of those characters so there's really no reason for me to pay for or do the hours of grinding necessary to unlock the top prizes.

For now, my wrap-up is that Multiversus isn't bad. It's probably the most interesting Smash knock-off I've played so far, but I can't really say it's "good" yet. If I complete quests/Battle Pass free tiers as I mess around, cool, but playing the same modes over and over to unlock a new sticker or costume for a character I don't like doesn't appeal to me. I'll pop back in when they add new characters to try them out if they're from an interesting franchise, but even if the many problems I've mentioned are fixed, there's still an enormous lack of content in the game right now. Until they add some single-player content, the game is neat but clunky and gets old quickly.

I'm probably also harsher on it/more down on continuing due to overwhelming "corporate synergy" feel to the whole thing. If it's not doing anything really new with the Smash style fighter, what's the game's purpose other than crass commercialism? What is it trying to do different and better from Smash or the TMNT Smash or the Nickelodeon Smash or the plethora of indie games that put a twist on Smash? Outside of making a free to play structure work, not much. Finding ways to bring in people for free to keep the matchmaking pool full is a really important thing for the industry to work on, but it would ideally be in service of a more interesting game. But ultimately, I think I'm playing because I want to like the game and for it to be a great contender against Smash Bros, rather than me actually liking the game, so after less than a week, I'm already pretty bored. But hey, at least it was free.