Review: Multiversus is back from a 1 year hiatus and is full of bugs (and I don’t mean the Bunny, even though he’s there, too)

I originally played Multiversus when it first came out in beta back in 2022. I’ve been a fan of party-style fighting games like Super Smash Bros and Brawlhalla for the majority of my life. So, giving me the ability to play one with a bunch of fun, licensed characters was always going to be a day-one download for me.

With Super Smash Bros Ultimate winding down around that time, everyone from Nickelodeon to LEGO was looking to get in on that void being left behind. Warner Brothers had Multiversus.

During the beta, the Multiversus developers offered a battle pass and the ability to spend money on microtransactions. It felt like this was just something that would ease into a full release like so many other early-access games do. But, it was a lot weirder than that.

Out of nowhere, no matter what the amount of gameplay you had put in, the game just… ended. A full year after releasing the initial Multiversus beta, back in June 2023, they announced plans to remove it. They claimed it was due to having to finish making the game, but it was jarring and felt pretty sudden.

Cut to just about a full year after that in May 2024. The full version of Multiversus is now out. Did removing the players for a full year help? What changed in the game? And is it worth your time?

Let’s dive into all of those answers because I have a lot of ground to cover.

Gameplay and Story

While Super Smash Bros is usually explained as toys in a toybox with epic stories involved, Multiversus desperately tries to take it a bit deeper. Rifts have opened up and Batman is putting together a crew.

If you’re familiar with games like Super Smash Bros, you understand the difference between a party fighting game and something more akin to the arcade-style Street Fighter. Multiversus leans way more heavily toward Nintendo’s flagship fighter.

All in all, Multiversus is comprised of three main ways to get into a game and start punching: Rifts, Local, and Online Play.

Rifts are small single-player modes that have you battle and do various tasks to unlock the next node. You’ll find a lot of that story here, as well as sudden (but skippable) cutscenes that feel unnecessary at times when you’re just wanting to get into the next match.

The Rift mode is used for unlocking various things sometimes, such as being able to get Agent Smith early and for free, if you’re motivated enough. But, they might be your best go-to for leveling up your unlocked fighters since you’re battling bots and not actual humans.

The best part of Multiversus is how varied the roster is

Speaking of unlocking fighters, you can choose from a wide array of Warner Brothers Discovery-owned characters, such as Bugs Bunny, Rick Sanchez, and Superman. 

However, you have to either slowly unlock them from dozens of hours of play each or pay real money to get them right now. It’s not unheard of, but it feels like a problem when certain missions require certain characters to even start them in Multiversus.

Each character has a bunch of tags attached to it to designate certain things. For instance, the standard Shaggy is tagged under Scooby-Doo, Animated, Human, and Detective. He’s also marked as a “Bruiser”.

Characters can be one of four fighter types: Bruiser, Mage, Tank, or Assassin. Each have their perks, but ultimately, it just determines their unseen stats. Bruisers punch harder and Tanks take more hits, etc.

While the character roster is pretty unique, there are some really weird entires that the Multiversus developers gave over way more popular characters. For instance, aside from Finn and Jake, you can unlock Adventure Time’s Banana Guard. Marceline, Ice King, and Princess Bubblegum are nowhere in sight.

They also included Lebron James from Space Jam as a fighter, which I’m sure is the only thing he’s famous for and definitely belongs in a fighting game. Reindog, as cute as he is, was an original character made by the Multiversus developers and is one of the hardest characters to use due to him being hard to control.

All I’m saying is they need to stop throwing darts at sticky notes on the wall and put in more fan-favorite characters because Black Adam showed up before Shazam or most of the Justice League members. And don’t get me started on the weird, cartoon-ified version of Arya Stark from Game of Thrones.

One more thing of note is the weird lack of Cartoon Network characters currently in Multiversus. Steven Universe and Garnet are there. But, aside from a Dexter’s Laboratory stage and the aforementioned Adventure Time entries, the other classic cartoons are missing. Not even a Smash Pokemon Trainer knockoff of Ben 10 made the cut.

There is a lot to overlook if you want to play Multiversus

From the Fighters screen, you can also edit their abilities, if you have the gems unlocked through tons of hours hoping you’ll get it or (you guessed it) paying real money to unlock and level them up quickly. 

This reminds me of how EA handled the abilities in Star Wars Battlefront II, which basically broke the game for anyone not spending money. Luckily, EA fixed it before it was a bigger problem prior to launch. But, Multiversus kept theirs from beta to launch

Costumes for Multiversus characters can vary pretty nicely for some like Velma and Harley Quinn. But, it was really weird to see Rick Sanchez, a man of a million variants, only have one special costume that you can buy. Even Morty has Evil Morty and President Morty (technically the same character but in different outfits).

From my time in the Multiversus beta, I noticed that the game felt pretty imbalanced. I had hoped that taking it away from us for a full year would solve that. But, alas, I had too high of hopes and this cash grab didn’t really do much with rollback netcode, laggy menus, or character balancing, as far as I can see, since the initial 2022 beta.

Once you go online, it’s pretty much the wild west in Multiversus. It doesn’t matter your level of experience or what you can do in the game. You’re going to be facing people who have somehow already made this game their lives and have figured out every possible exploit for their main. There is no escaping it since there is no ranked system as far as I can tell.

It’s not unheard of that you’ll suddenly be on the opposite side of an arena due to the game putting you there from lag. Hitting buttons often lag behind by up to a full second as well, meaning you didn’t actually hit an opponent standing right in front of you.

Since balancing is not exactly a thing in Multiversus, you may likely get wrecked if you aren’t top of the top from the get-go. While I can understand a “get good” mentality in FGC games, some of us just don’t have the time to try to fight a semi-broken game before we can even fight an opponent.

Just turn off the music, but enjoy the art when you can see it

While I can appreciate the various dialogue and cutscenes to try to at least tell a story, the writing in Multiversus is a bit rough. They handed the writing over to someone who doesn’t quite know the characters they’re writing and it really shows in how they talk to each other in some scenarios. 

For instance, listening to Batman talk to Shaggy about rifts and how important he is comes off hilarious in a way that the developer likely didn’t intend.

Additionally, you’re given an announcer voice (which has unlockable character voice options) that are really rigid and just says the same thing every chance they can. 

The music is okay. I wish they did more with it. Hearing the Rick and Morty theme on loop in the Cromulon stage felt like a missed opportunity, though, considering you’re fighting on the “Get Shwifty” and “Head Bent Over” stage. The audio in this game did not, in fact, “show me what you got”.

I find myself turning down my audio or muting altogether when I play. It increases the enjoyment of the experience.

As for character art, the characters are fine. Their abilities are unique and it gives some depth to them as you play. 

The Multiversus backgrounds and stages are good when it comes to design, though, when you can see them. I like the Scooby-Doo Haunted Mansion stage and how it’s designed, but it’s definitely similar to Smash’s Luigi’s Mansion stage. The game does tend to over use it when they need to make something spooky for Stripe or Jason.

Here’s a problem I run into across the board, though. Some assets and graphics are just… blurred. It’s like they don’t load right from boot up and just remain blurred. When it happens, it stays and affects a lot of the graphics, even during a fight. This becomes really apparent on the Season Pass claim screens where entire KO animations and some costume assets stay blurry.

In addition, some characters are just entirely the wrong color in execution, even when sitting directly next to a portrait of the same character. Jake the Dog should be yellow in the fighter selection screen, I assume, but he is a very dead-looking shade of gray.

Not that any of it matters, though. In battle, the game automatically sets you up to shade your entire character and any other fighters. You are entirely yellow (unlike Jake the Dog’s default skin), while allies and opponents are shaded entirely blue and red, respectively. I’m sure there’s probably a way to turn this off in settings somewhere, if I hunted for it, but making it the default feels awkward.

Coziness and Cons

If you’re playing a fighting game to get cozy, unless this is your specific (space) jam, you’re in for a bad time most of the time. Fighting games, for me, get my adrenaline pumping and my heart rate way up. I’ve been playing Brawlhalla, for example, since it was originally in beta many years ago.

So, don’t look to this game for an easy or chill time. You’re in it to win it or not at all.

However, I think this game needed some more time in the oven before it came back. The characters and action feel pretty identical to how it was a year ago in beta. 

The only thing that feels like they changed is the monetization. This game is drowning in ways you can give them money. The whales out there likely already have unlocked all of the gems needed to make a well-balanced fighter and it shows in the gameplay online.

If you head to the shop, you can buy characters, costumes, bundles, special packs, currency, gems, and so much more. As mentioned, this isn’t abnormal. But, the entire shop lags when you go to it due to how much they try to load into it at once.

However, something that really got under my skin was the need to spend money to properly complete some Rifts. During the Rift Detectives Rift, for instance, you need a character with a “Graphic T”, which is a special costume only certain characters can get that has them wearing a t-shirt over their usual outfit. 

You’d think that’d be easy to get since that’s a requirement to get all of the diamond star things in the early Rift, but no. You either have to spend money or hope that you can eventually unlock a costume for a fighter you already own from daily logins or events.

If you’re playing Multiversus before June 8th, 2024, you can get the incredibly out-of-place “Clown Squad Velma”, a Velma wearing a Joker-themed Graphic T, which is really useful… if you already have Velma unlocked. I don’t. I have to wait for her to be on the free rotation to even try her out and finish that Rift. After that, good luck because I don’t know what you’ll possibly have as options.

How are there so many problems in a game that had so much development time put into it?

Speaking of the free rotation, the game has one. Every so often, the rotation offers you a few fighters you may not have unlocked. This is pretty common in these kinds of games to allow you to utilize someone you haven’t tried before.

But, the problem is that it feels like they just randomize the free rotation and you could just be dealt a bad hand. Currently, in my game, I was given two “Mage” class characters and a “Bruiser”. This doesn’t help me if I needed a tank or assassin due to it being a mission. Luckily, I have Jason as a Tank. But, I have no Assassin fighters.

I haven’t even gone into the technical troubles I’ve run into. I’ve had the game crash on me five separate times on my Xbox across only three days of play, taking me all the way back to the home screen. I’d consider that my cut-off point each time and step away.

Final Verdict

I can’t complain too much since the game is free. By playing the beta originally, they gave a handful of freebies to us, such as the Battle Pass and some unlockables, for free. It also kept fighters that I had unlocked during the beta, such as Superman, Wonder Woman, and Morty.

The Battle Pass unlocks Jason Vorhees at the first level, so it’s nice that I got a Tank for a freebie as I was getting acclimated to the new menus since beta. But, aside from needing to log in a couple of times to get Banana Guard, that was about it in terms of worthwhile free items.

Of course, that was nice of them. But, it doesn’t excuse the bugs, lag, and issues that came with the re-launch of the game after a year of it being MIA.

Moreover, the game itself is just hard to play in this state. It’s playable, technically. But, it suffers from a lot of cash-grab pitfalls that other Smash clones have fallen into. 

It feels more like Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl (the first one that had a lot of problems) and not Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl 2 (which came out during Multiversus’ hiatus and addressed those problems).

If you’re looking for a good party-style fighting game, just go play Smash. Any Smash. If you’re looking for a free one, on the other hand, Brawlhalla is available on every system you can name from the past 8 years and mobile. 

I’ll try this again in another year and see if anything has changed or been fixed. But, part of me thinks it might not make it that long. David Zaslav might just delete it off their servers and write it off for taxes, as they do with everything else.

If fighting games aren’t necessarily your speed, but you still enjoy fast paced games then you should check out my review on Berserk Boy — a love letter to Mega Man.