I got the opportunity to try about MultiVersus, Warner Bros. first platform fighter that lets you team up with or against your friends with iconic characters such as Superman and Finn from Adventure Time. What sets this fighter apart from games such as Brawlhalla and Smash Bros is the unique co-op abilities that encourage teamplay. However, there’s something else too!
I was quite surprised by how MultiVersus played! I was expecting a Brawlhalla type of game, a floaty experience to say the least. Not that Brawlhalla is a bad game or anything, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. MultiVersus subverted all my expectations and ended up being a well-rounded game. It just played well, and pulling off combos online wasn’t half-bad! Not to mention that the visuals are great and there’s voice acting interaction with every character which was charming to see.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t have bugs, broken mechanics, or anything of that nature (it’s a closed beta so I’ll give them that pass), but the fact that the game is already playing so well, with cross-play and rollback implemented is impressive. Now, despite all of this, there’s another feature that the game has that I thought I wouldn’t have enjoyed as much, and that is the Battle pass model.
This model is nothing new in gaming, games like Fortnite and Apex Legends already have this in place to encourage people to come back, however, with a game like MultiVersus, a fighting game that doesn’t have the best track recording of maintaining a player base after a month, ( it’s never a fighting game’s fault really, fighting games always have a steep learning curve) this would entice people to get better at a fighting game, and reward them for it. Before that, your wins were the only rewards you’d get, but now you’ll have other incentives too. This may even open up doors for other fighting games to take this model.
And given that this model is free-to-play, there’s nothing stopping Warner Bros from adding characters to the base game for years to come, with costumes and emotes to add. So long as updates and balance patches are rolled out on the regular, we may have something here on our hands. I’m looking forward to seeing how this game and any other free-to-play fighter in the same genre will evolve under this new model.
