multiversus should be a great game. it's a free-to-play game instead.

23 Jun, 2024

i'll admit, i was not committed to multiversus when it first came out. i thought the gameplay was fun, i loved the focus on 2v2 in a fighting game, and i even thought it was kinda cute. however, i couldn't really keep playing it, as i was still in a household without wired internet, and wi-fi with a fighting game is just horrific. changes made not longer i stepped back that made leveling significantly slower kept me away. then they took it offline, worked on it for a while, and are finally re-releasing it. it is such a worse product as a result.

this is not a minority opinion, of course. practically every video of the game that gets posted is flooded with comments about how slow it looks compared to when it was new. and it is, it really really is slow. it's not as slow as it was initially shown a month or so ago, but it's a noticeably more sluggish game. i don't particularly care why this was done, i only care that it has and it sucks. this isn't even based off watching high level gameplay, i'm comparing my own gameplay to footage i made in 2022.

but, hey, it's got single player content now. it's... fine. it's trying to ape the classic arcade modes present in (some) smash titles, and it doesn't really work but they're trying. however, this is where the "free-to-playness" of the product starts to rear it's ugly head. y'see, the point of playing this new mode, rifts, is to get rewards that can be used to buy new characters and items. in order to get those rewards, you need to complete challenges on the various stages. simple stuff.

here's the rub: these are absolutely geared towards punishing you for not paying up. most of these challenges require playing certain types of characters. some of them require you to be playing a certain type of skin.

alright, fine, whatever, i'll buy some characters. when this game launched they had ways to get most or all the characters in one bundle. except... it's not here. it's gone. they took out the ability to buy character any way but piecemeal. fine, whatever, but the cost of buying all of them can't be too bad, right? I'll spare you long form of it here¹, but the tl;dr is that the absolute least you can spend without excessive grinding is $155, and that's before tax. inexcusable.

even beyond the f2p stuff, the game has clear deficiencies that are, again, inexcusable. you can't try out fighters in training mode anymore. there's no way to tell ping or connection type, ditto for the ability to deny a match. there's no ranked mode currently, so the only way to get a competitive match is to either arrange sets on discord or rolling the dice on unranked. and finally the netplay experience is just trash. this is, unfortunately, gonna be the case for games on consoles where the primary connection method is wi-fi, but even matches that feel good most of the time can experience bizarre time dilations that make you feel like dizzy mr. krabs after it recovers.

what makes this all the worse is that the game is still really fun. as slow as it can be, i can't deny that i have a good time when i get into a non-laggy competitive match. 2v2 matches are a lot of fun. the characters have cool ideas in their kits. there's also just a lot of ideas that i think make this a game that fits my sensibilities more than a game like smash. ideas that other games in the genre should steal, such as dedicated neutral buttons and UI elements that follow the characters. however, it's hard to truly enjoy it when the game is trying desperately to inspect my wallet every 5 minutes.

there's a way to make this game worth my time, and maybe even my money. it's a long way off from here.

#cohost