Carded

I'm not sure where I first heard about DC Dual Force. Probably MMO Bomb or MassivelyOP, unless maybe it was NME. For a music magazine, they do run a lot of gaming news, some of it quite random.

I may not have paid much attention to which site I was looking at but at least I registered the salient points:

1. Free
2. Steam
3. DC

Put all three together and there seemed no reason not to give it a try. I'm enough of a DC fan to get mildly excited at the thought of just about anything that might feature one of my favorite characters. Granted, most times it's just it's Batman again, but I can always hope.

As far as I can gather, the game is supposed to be DC's answer to the highly-rated Marvel Snap. I already added that one to my Steam account weeks ago but I haven't yet gotten around to playing it. I must not be such a Marvel fan, obviously, although as I was running through my mental list of Favorite Characters From Superhero Comics just now, it did seem to be mostly names from Marvel that drifted to the top. I can thank the relentless over-exposure of the last few years for that, I guess.

Both games are DCGs or DCCGs or whatever the acronym is. Collectable card games in which there aren't any actual cards. I have no idea whether the gameplay is identical or even similar, not having played both of them (Probably could have done that before I decided to write this post) but people do seem to like comparing the two so I guess it's at least in the same general ballpark.

DCDF has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, which seems to reflect not so much a meh response as a psychotic division. From the reviews I read, people either absolutely love it or utterly despise it. Very little middle ground.

Having played for nearly three and half hours - a couple of lengthy sessions - I find myself weirdly in sympathy with both camps. I spent most of the time thinking "This is a total waste of my time. It's half-assed nonsense. I'll just have another go..." I wouldn't mind playing again right now...

The game begins with a Tutorial in which - guess who? - Batman takes it upon himself to show you how to play. There's a framing device that I found amusing; Bats keeps beginning to explain some technical feature he thinks is important but before he can get into it he gets interrupted by some emergency and we have go sort it out, which is when the actual instruction happens. Learning by doing rather than yawning through yet another Batman Knows Best lecture. Jason Todd must be laughing his cape off.

Other than the actual gameplay, the tutorial involves voice acting, comic panels and speech balloons, which not unreasonably creates the impression there's going to be some form of narrative structure or storyline to the game. As far as I can tell, there is not. Once you hit the game proper, all of that goes away. At least, it did during the eight or nine rounds I played. Maybe it comes back later but I doubt it.

I'm guessing the nearest you'll get to a plot is in Comics mode. There are a number of Modes, in one of which, Comics, you get to play through the events that occured in specific published issues. Well, you do if you imagine them as comics produced for pre-school children, the kind with a single picture on every page and just the odd caption to explain the extremely basic plot. Oh, and a lot of sound effects apparently lifted verbatim from the ultra-camp 'sixties Batman TV show. 

This perfectly sums up my issue with most, if not all, of the superhero video games I've ever played. They all seem to have been designed by people who have not only never read an actual comic but who have taken all of their cues from the kind of cultural commentators who believe the form exists purely and simply for the entertainment of very small children or adults with an extremely low IQ. 

Given that the absolutely least interesting thing about superhero comics over the last forty or fifty years has been all the punching each other in the face, I find this quite peculiar. It's not as though other media haven't moved on from the 1950s stereotype. I mean, I know a lot of non super-hero fans complain about the final act of every Marvel movie being one long fight scene but even those critics acknowledge the two hours of soap opera melodrama and would-be witty badinage that comes before the explosions.

In superhero games it's just thump thump thump. It certainly is in this one.

I'm not saying it's not fun. It is quite fun. What I'm saying is that this kind of gameplay has absolutely nothing to do with the reasons any of these characters ever became famous enough for anyone to care about them in the first place. The designers are relying one hundred per cent on the recognition factor to pull eyes to their game without understanding why people recognize the characters to begin with.

Of course, if it featured wholly original characters no-one outside the company had ever heard of, no-one would be playing it at all, so I totally understand why they're doing it...

The question is whether seeing a bunch of familiar names and costumes on screen is enough, when none of those characters either act or speak in any way whatsoever like their originals. And no, it's not.

Honestly, it might be, if there was even the smallest hat-tip to authenticity, so you at least felt you were looking at the same characters you grew up with. They do change all the time as different writers and artists offer their interpretations after all. In DCDF, there's not the least concession to any of that prior history. The mechanics randomly team villains with heroes and pit longtime allies against each other for absolutely no discernible reason. Authenticity is clearly the last thing on anyone's mind. 

At first I couldn't really figure out what was going on. I'm long past the time when I knew what was current in the DC Universe so for a moment I thought maybe some of these people had switched sides. Certainly, over the years, a lot of villains have gone straight and the odd hero has turned bad, although it rarely lasts long. After a couple of rounds, though, I realised it was just opportunistic game mechanics in action.

There is a spurious veneer of canonical coherency. As a deckbuilder, the game groups the cards, to an extent, by having you pick from Teams. Each Leader (You get two Leaders in each Deck.) has their own Team, which is vaguely consistent with expectations but the whole thing falls down when you realise you can pair a Hero with a Villain as your two Leaders if you want and then your whole hand is just a mishmash of good and evil.

I had Poison Ivy and Batman working together. And Flash and Harley Quinn. I could just about accept that as not wholly egregious. Ivy and Harley have both worked with heroes before, when it suited them. I don't think anyone's going to be making the same allowances for The Joker or Doomsday, though. You can pair Doomsday with Superman or The Joker with Batman if you want and they'll work together as happily as though they weren't mortal enemies and (In at least some continuities.) each other's murderers.

This is the sort of thing that annoys me even while I'm telling myself it really doesn't matter. I know it's just a dumb card game that only exists as a bit of mindless fun meant to make money but I can't get past eighty years of history that easily. The gameplay may be moderately compelling but the lack of context keeps getting in the way. 

I keep asking myself  "Why is any of this happening?" and coming up with nothing but "Because". And just because isn't enough.

All told, I'm not sorry I gave the game a try. I'm not even saying I won't play it a little more although I suspect even its limited appeal will fade quite fast. I am a little disappointed by just how cynically exploitative the use of the characters seems to be. I wasn't expecting much but I got less than that.

Even the art, which I've seen mentioned by negative reviewers as the game's only saving grace, isn't that impressive. Much of it looks souless and calculating, lacking the personal feel I'd expect from even the weaker artists working on the comcs themselves. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if some of it wasn't done by some of those same artists - it does look like the kind of thing people knock out for a few dollars a sketch at comicons.

Having exposed myself to the DC version of an online collectible card game, I suppose my next logical step is to do the same with their frenemy across the panel borders. I might as well. I already have it installed. 

Marvel Snap has a much better reputation so my expectations are higher this time. We'll see if they're diappointed once more or if I come back a convert. Place your bets now.