Gaming🎮 MultiVersus is better than ever on its second bite of the apple, but I can’t believe it didn’t learn its lesson from the first launch

[Royal_Lizard]

Ah, MultiVersus. A gem of a game. The only place on earth – digital or otherwise – where you can watch Jason Voorhees use a bed to slam Velma from Scooby Doo into a golden blimp full of chicken drumsticks, for some reason. The only game in which you can hear ‘American Boy’s’ Estelle belittle Batman whilst Bugs Bunny takes a reaming from definitely-not-Justin Roiland.

It’s back. And better than ever. If you’ve not been following the peculiar drama surrounding this Smash Bros upstart, let me cut it down to under a paragraph for you: the game was pulled offline a year ago, with publisher Warner Bros. and developer Player First Games citing more time in the oven as a reason for taking it away from players (plenty of whom paid for content in the ‘open beta’). Fans bemoaned infrequent updates, and some characters needed to be pulled from the game entirely because they were so broken.

But time, as they say, heals all wounds. The game sprung back from the void yesterday, and you know what? I forgot how much I missed the cartoon capering of it all. It’s madcap, it’s camp, it’s absurd, and it’s great fun. It might not be as tight or responsive as Smash, and there may not be quite as much depth underwriting the whole experience (yet), but there’s a pulsing core of something very special here, and the 2v2 nature of the game feels as strong as ripe for exploitation as ever.

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