DC Universe Online Previews

Two more sites have had a chance to try out DC Universe Online at the ComicCon. Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Being PC-gaming-first here, you may not know Crackdown. It’s RealTime World’s of the forthcoming APB’s first game, a sort of superpowered Cop Game in a freeform city where you generally fucked shit up with increasing fuckitude. It kind of struck me as some kind of evolutionary step on from games like Final Fight or the city-based Brawler, via Urban Chaos and GTA. Hypermacho feats and chaos on tap.

DC Universe is a bit like that. Maybe the animation is twitchy. Hell, it probably still is. But I don’t notice, because seeing a car, picking it up and then throwing it at Lex Luthor makes immediate, emotional sense, on at least a couple of levels.

The first one is basically the key THROW CAR AT PERSON thing. I am very strong. I can pick shit up and lob it, which demonstrates the games’ key physics system which they’re making a big deal about. It seems to work – the interactions from powers which create objects like that are pretty nifty. For example, my character had ice powers. One of them was creating an enormous ball of ice and lobbing it at someone – except the ball of ice was an actual object, that flew and hit them, and flew off, perhaps causing more chaos. Freezing someone in a block of ice doesn’t just immobilise them – it turns them into a block of ice, that can be then interacted with. You swiftly end up weighing up whether you want to use it as a weapon, or throw it at someone else or just leaving them alone – as obviously enough, using it in some way is going to shatter it and free the person inside swiftly. It’s obvious enough stuff, perhaps, but it hasn’t been applied to the MMO space but seems at once natural and appealing.

Massively.

The powersets I played with were: electrical-based melee, light-based ranged dps, fire-based archer and ice-based ranged dps. It’s not entirely accurate to slot these characters into role archetypes. Though some have specialties like ranged dps or crowd control, they all have a large range of powers. The trick is that you can only slot four powers at any given time. Your character can go with all dps abilities or a mix of crowd control and group support abilities. Fortunately, powers can be reslotted between battles to alter your playstyle on the fly.

Battle itself was fast and furious. Every character has a fast low damage attack activated with the left mouse button and a slower, higher damage attack with the right mouse button. Plus they have the aforementioned four slots for special attacks activated with the 1-4 number keys. Each special ability has it’s own cooldown timer. That’s the basics. It’s what you do with your powers that makes this game so exciting.