DC UNIVERSE ONLINE / DEVELOPER: DAYBREAK GAME COMPANY / PUBLISHER: WB GAMES / PLATFORM: PC, PS4, SWITCH (REVIEWED), XBOX ONE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Originally released back in 2011, DC Universe Online recently arrived on Switch. But has it lived long enough to see itself become a villain?
MMO’s being free to play is all the rage these days, but they’re few and far between on the Nintendo Switch so this game certainly fills a gap in the market.
In DCO, you start out by creating your character and deciding if you want to be a hero or a villain. The initial character creation allows you to either model your character on an existing DC hero / villain or create your own from scratch. The amount of options is impressive, offering detailed custom character choices with numerous powers and designs. The free to play side of things is very generous, giving you an impressive 15 characters to choose from as your hero inspiration during the character creation screen, with 18 others being behind a pay wall. Creating your character dictates who your superhero / villain mentor will be, and you’re quickly thrown into a mission to help them out as they show you the ropes. Once the tutorial is done, which is fully skippable, you start the game at level 4.
Initial missions mainly consist of killing certain amount of enemies, which can get very repetitive. Eventually these missions improve once you get to team up with others and form the usual MMO trio of healers, tanks and damage. Expect a good few hours of grinding until you get to that point though, but if you’ve played an MMO before, you already know that.
The voice work for the game is excellent, with Kevin Conroy resuming his role as Batman, Mark Hamill as the Joker, Will Wheaton as Robin, James Marsden as Lex Luther, and Firefly’s Gina Torres and Adam Baldwin as Wonder Woman and Superman respectively. Unfortunately the game looks like what it is – an 8 year old PS3 game. The worlds aren’t exactly densely populated with people and don’t remotely feel alive, and enemy skins are repetitive and unimaginative.
The Switch port runs smoothly – barring issues with small text in handheld and the Switch’s lack of voice support, it’s probably the perfect system for a game like this. If you’re an MMO fan and want one to play on the go, then this game is essential for you. However, if you’ve never been into the genre, this game probably isn’t going to change your opinion.
