Looks good on the outside but lacks substance on the inside. That pretty much sums up DC Universe Online.
The features are appealing enough in this massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) by Sony Online Entertainment.
Imagine the prospect of playing alongside and against the heroes and villains that populate the DC Universe such as Superman or the Joker.
It is also a beautiful game which, like superhero MMORPG City Of Heroes, allows for many options for customising how the characters look and the powers they have.
A character can be created to look like anything from a barbarian to a rock golem to a zombie.
The superhuman powers range from telekinesis (nothing beats lifting an enemy into the air and then flinging a bus at him and his army of goons), to shapeshifting into a werewolf (good for Twilight fans out there).
However, after playing the telekinetic heroine Psycho Girl to the maximum level of 30 in just over a week (believe me, the levelling system is the easiest and most generous I have seen in all my years of gaming), I was left with serious doubt about whether the game could sustain a gamer’s interest beyond three months.
The content, while immersive and rich with DC lore, appears limited. For example, the end-game content – the lifeblood of many MMORPGs – is sorely lacking.
Many of the missions which open up for the characters at level 30 use the same maps and are repeats of the earlier quests, albeit with a higher degree of difficulty.
This just means more enemies, tougher mobs and better loot.
Its player-versus-player (PVP) mode happened too infrequently for my liking, although this could well be due to the general lack of interest of PVP on the server.
The few times I managed to get into a PVP instance, the experience of battling other players felt unfulfilling.
In other MMORPG games like Warhammer Online or World Of Warcraft, how a team engages its opponents depends on the different character classes forming the group.
For example, I would shudder at the thought of going into a fight with no healers in my team.
This element of strategy was missing here.
The PVP fights I participated in were free-for-alls where every player just plunged head first into battle. Other classes, which also have a generous measure of crowd-control abilities like stuns, knockbacks and knockdowns, made my role as a controller somewhat redundant.
The four classes in this game are: tanks, to soak up damage; healers, to mitigate damage; nukers, to dish out the pain; and controllers, to render the enemies ineffective and control the tide of battle.
In the end, it plays more like an arcade action game with an online element than an MMORPG.
I was also disappointed that the game did not encourage grouping with other players – a definitive aspect of a MMORPG. Even at the higher levels where a player was required to at least form a tag team with another to clear a mission, I know of some players who bragged that they could complete it solo.
Perhaps the best part of this game is its lush, immersive world that DC comic fans will be familiar with. Imagine Psycho Girl flying under the skies of Gotham City with the Batman alert in the background, or soaring past Clark Kent’s office at the Daily Planet.
