Pomegranate Seeds: 8/10

Multiversus, Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment’s platform fighter, has made their most controversial update on September 8th, 2022, with questionable nerfs/buffs and most importantly, an addition of a new character that has his popcorn and is ready to pop off from the beloved movie “Gremlins”.

Update 1.01 was an amazing addition to the game as it fixed a lot of characters, added great additions to the cast of characters with Morty, and introduced a battle pass for players to enjoy while playing. Update 1.02 however as gone a step back and changed some characters that didn’t need it and changed the game fundamentals in their entirety.

The newest character joining the fight is the cuddly creature Gizmo from “Gremlins“. Gizmo, a support type, doesn’t do a lot of solo damage but provides a ton of additional fire/damage for his teammate. Gizmo’s normal attacks range from throwing popcorn, shooting a bow and arrow, playing the keyboard, and flapping his long ears. His keyboard shoots musical notes that can buff his allies and damage his enemies, and his popcorn amplifies his bow and arrows power by making it a scatter shot.

Gizmo’s special attacks are hilariously deadly. The vary from drive a toy car across the stage, to hiding in his toy box to reflect projectiles being thrown at him, to singing his heart to buff his allies, and hitching a ride on his allies to devaste the enemy team. Gizmo’s air special also consist of the use of an umbrella to glide around, uppercutting the enemies in the jaw, and getting an enough velocity to sit on his opponents.

All around, Gizmo’s kit makes him a fun and versatile character to play with friends, but isn’t that great for solo players.

The change the Developers at Warner Bros made to the hitbox register seems better than what it actually is. Before Update 1.01, the hitbox for any character was a giant rectangle around them. This can cause problems due to objects not directly hitting the player but hitting the air around the player, causing an unfair disadvantage on bigger characters, and giving agile, smaller characters an obvious advantage.

In Update 1.02 however, they changed the hitbox system to make it more fair for players. Instead of a rectangle placed around the model of the characters, they went in and made it every pixel of all the characters so nothing fishy could happen and could only make the gameplay fair. Players believe that this will make them practically invincible due to how fast you can make a character go, but what they don’t realize is that the model always is moving in a time frame of 60 frames per second.

The change to the hitbox system was and improvement we needed but it could very well be misleading to players.

Lastly, the most controversial part of this update is nerfs and buffs. Characters who were previously nerfed for having an unfair advantage have been re-buffed and put back to their former glory. Characters like Finn “Adventure Time” who previously had a backpack that could send to Saturn and back was nerfed for the clear advantage in any match. Sadly, Warner Bros has gone back on this and put Finn back on his throne with giving a buff to his backpack which previously was a nuisance.

They buffed characters like Garnet “Steven Universe” and Reindog (Warner Bros Original) as well who were already problematic as well, while nerfing characters who were fixed like Wonder Woman “Batman: The Animated Series” and Arya Stark “Game of Thrones“.

Even with these controversial additions, Warners Bros did fix some issues with characters like Bugs Bunny’s overall gameplay effect, Superman’s ability to catch you anywhere, and Shaggy who has been running the show since day one. They even gave some fixes to characters like Lebron James’ basketball capabilities, Morty’s space-time continuum breaking shenanigans, and Batman’s abilities as a whole.

Overall, Update 1.02 of Multiversus is a fun and interesting addition to the game, but definitely was a step-back from the previous addition that was Update 1.02. Update 1.02 is a solid 8/10 and could have improved more on what the last update had brought forward to the table.