DC Universe™ Online

I played this game for years and always had fun but beware the microtransactions. The best bang for the buck is to ignore buying individual expansions and subscribe. It gives you all the content. It has been a while but I believe you can get currency to eventually buy things, like expansions, from their store. When playing, I used an Xbox controller. It wasn't that hard to toggle powers but, as usual, the keyboard/mouse is hard to beat. 1. Character creation is a blast with so many options that are free. There are MTX items but the free selection gives a ton of flexibility. 2. Marquee DC characters act as your mentor. Depending on where you start and if you choose to be a Hero of Villain you will have an iconic character as your mentor. For example choosing Gotham as a good guy gets you conversations and quests from Batman while character who chose to be badguys get The Joker. Other characters show up now and then too, which helps keep it ground and remind you that this is the DC universe (online)! And to top it all off, the voice acting is top notch. 3. You get to explore many famous locations from the comics, tv shows, and movies. Some of which are pretty spectacular! Heroes and villains encounter all sorts of folks from the DC comics. For example: in the open world almost every zone has a well known character from the comics. you get to meet Bizzaro pretty early in some quest chains (and probably die the first time) but you can eventually power up to kick his butt! 4. There's a lot of solo content to run through even at max level. And the very occasional raid. 5. If you are dedicated to chasing hard things, there's plenty of stories to find with the Riddler's "?" and the various audio recordings in every open world zone. 6. The different travel powers are fun. Flight is the most straight forward and predictable while super-speed and acrobatics can be tougher to master. With super-speed you can run up walls, like the Flash, and when you go fast enough from a high vertical location you can jump miles which is a real treat, but getting a precise landing point is a little tougher since you don't really have directional control in the air. Acrobatics can be hard mode. You can still traverse anywhere but the races get tougher earlier on than the other travel modes. This movement mode is different than anything I've seen in any other game. There is nuance to each mode that provides a skill gap since mastery of your power is important to the later races. These can get very hard, very frustrating, but ultimately there's a nice little victory rush when you do get the highest award on a really challenging race. 7. The level cap used to be 30 (it might have changed since I last played) You get to have fun exploring and getting messages from your mentor, hit max level and have whole new worlds to explore. This gets you to the end game faster than any other game I've played. The biggest cons: 1. Microtransactions are a pain and some can be considered to be required. This is especially true if you're on the subscription model yet still have to engage with the MTX system. You have to buy all sorts of "optional" items, like keys to open caches you pick up, but they really aren't optional if you want the best experience. 2. Player population can be low. I am not sure about servers in various regions, but the US servers can be dead half the day. There's enough to keep you entertained solo, but things like raiding can be a rare event. With how important gear is this can become a real bottleneck to progression. 3. So many dang currencies! It seems like every zone requires different tokens to purchase the solo gear. I hate the complexity of multiple currencies, especially since some of them take up precious inventory space.