Multiversus Preview | Taken for a Quickie

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Warner Bros. various worlds collide in the latest brawler from WB Games, we took MultiVersus for a spin, during its closed alpha, to give you our first impressions.

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by James Michael Parry

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@james_parry

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So, what’s MultiVersus all about?
There’s not a huge amount of story setup, but the gist of it is that characters like Batman, Steven Universe, Shaggy from Scooby Doo and even Game of Thrones' Arya Stark fight it out in themed arenas.

That sounds a lot like Super Smash Bros...?
There’s no denying it, there are definitely plenty of similarities – tumbling characters off the screen even triggers the same explosion animation – but the cast of colourful characters are all WB’s own, and show off a variety of different fighting styles (including “brawlers” like Taz the Tazmanian devil from Animaniacs), with a cartoony visual style which brings everything together.

What’s it like to play?
The tutorial, even just in the alpha, is broken down to really walk you through dodges, movement and a variety of moves, which, naturally, vary from character to character. The standard two against two or 4-player free-for-all is about as chaotic as you’d expect, but some of the characters feel a little sluggish to move, particularly in the air. Plus there’s no items to mix things up during fights.​

What is there to keep you playing?
Of the 15 characters (which will no doubt expand after launch), five are locked away behind in-game currency coins, which will be available as premium currency when the game eventually launches, free-to-play around July, after an open beta.

Within the game there’s a plethora of unlocks including character variants (a.k.a. costumes), ringout animations, taunts, 2D emotes, profile icons and banners, but otherwise, beyond mastering each character’s moves, there’s no singleplayer story to explore here.

How are the characters?
As you might expect, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Even though each character has the same basic controls, some movesets can feel more varied than others. For example, Wonder Woman has a lasso and a variety of shield moves to play around with, but Taz seems to turn into a whirlwind at the drop of a hat.

You can customise characters’ play style to a small extent with a series of offensive and defensive perks, which unlock once you’ve main-ed them for a while, though it was difficult to say how much of an impact this had on gameplay after only a few days of play.​

So what’s the verdict?
There have been plenty of games which have gone after Smash Bros.' crown in the past to varying success, from PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale to Brawlhalla, and none have really hit the spot. Warner Bros. certainly has a suite of characters to choose from, if the never-ending cameos in Space Jam A New Legacy are anything to go by, so there’s certainly potential for fun future updates.

In terms of what’s here right now, given it will be free-to-play it ticks the boxes you’d expect, but there might not be enough variety of stages to keep hardcore fighting fans hooked in the long run. Once the open beta rolls around in July, which seems likely to lead right into the full release, we’ll see the full range of content the game has to offer. For now, it’s one to keep an eye on.