Too Many Games. Let's Play Another!

I find myself, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the happy position of having far more ideas for posts than I'm likely to find time to write. Is that a happy, position though? Better than the alternative, I guess.

Ideas are coming so fast now I can't keep up with them all and it doesn't help that new ones seem to be appearing by the day. I certainly wasn't expecting to be posting this afternoon about a game I'd never even heard of until this morning, that's for sure. But that's what's happening.

I generally start the day by flipping through Feedly to see what's turned up overnight. Among the posts this morning was this one at MMOBomb about a game called DC: Dark Universe.

As a life-long DC fan, just about any mention of the IP gets my attention so I was pretty excited to come across a DC game I'd never heard of. I followed the link in the piece to find out what it was all about...

...and it was absolutely no help at all. 

Seriously, I wish people wouldn't do that. I mean, sure, I do it myself but, geez, don't do what I do. Do it properly!

The one hyperlink in the body of the post just goes to their section on strategy games. There are 114 games listed there and DC: Dark Legion isn't even one of them! The three links at the foot of the post go to articles about different games altogether. The final two links go to the same damn post I was already reading! 

FFS! I understand you want to keep readers inside your garden but if it's the first time you've ever posted about a game, at least link to the source! 

So I googled it and found the official DC: Dark Legion website. I mean, it wasn't hard... 

And the official website wasn't much better. It's lovely to look at. It's flashy and vibrant and exciting and entirely in keeping with what a website for a superhero game should be. But just try finding out any actual, hard information about the game there.

I couldn't even figure out what sort of game it was. There's no FAQ or Gameplay section. There's a page where you can flip through a few images of various heroes to see the name and date of the issue of the comic in which they first appeared, which is great and all but it doesn't tell you how to play the game.

What to do? I dunno. I guess... download, install and play? I mean, if you want to know what some machine you never saw before does, you press the big red button, right? We all know that.

There were options to install from Google Play or the Apple Store, or from a generic Android APK or Windows button. Since I was on the desktop, I naturally picked Windows. In retrospect, I should probably have gone for Google Play.

That's because the game, as I discovered, when I came to run it, opens in a phone-sized window. Perhaps unreasonably, I was expecting a full-screen option for Windows but then, at the time, I didn't even know it was primarily a mobile game. As I said, the website tells you nothing and the MMOBomb piece never mentions platforms at all.

The only reason Google Play might have been a better choice is that, from memory, I think it frames mobile games in a more coherent way for PC users. The straight-up Windows option for DCDL just plonks a window in the middle of your screen and it doesn't even fit. The bottom is out of sight and I couldn't find a way to move it. 

Not that it makes any difference. The tiny part that's missing doesn't have any controls or information you need. It's just aesthetically unpleasing to see it like that. Or, rather, not to see it.

The installation itself went very smoothly although the game has a surprisingly large footprint - nearly 9GB. That seems huge for a mobile game. Maybe the mobile client is smaller. It also wants you to install it on an SSD and it didn't give me an option which one - I have three inside the case and one outside. It just went straight for the C drive, which is not where I would have put it. 

All of that left me predisposed to feel critical about the whole thing. I almost cancelled the download at a couple of points, asking myself if I really needed the game at all. In the end, inertia carried me through and I'm glad it did. I don't have an exact "time played" for my first session but I've been playing it on and off all day. 

Once installed, it's a fairly seamless experience. I didn't even need to make an account. I'm playing as a "Guest" but I was assigned a user ID and I've logged in and out to check persistence and my progress has been saved. If I carry on playing, I'll probably sign up properly but for now, Guest status will do.

After a brief opening to set the scene (Earth being invaded by extra-dimensional threats under the control of The Batman Who Laughs.) the Monitor turns up and asks you a few gnomic questions. If your answers - and you do get a choice - have any impact on your character, I have no clue what it might be. 

You also get to name your character. My hero is called Floradelle, which is as good a name as many a hero in my opinion. The game uses her name in text but not, of course, in voice-overs, of which there are quite a few, especially in the opening stages.

And they're pretty good, the voice-overs. An awful lot of voice actors must pay the bills doing well-known super-heroes, which must be a bit like being an impressionist or a sound-alike. The starting line-up includes Green Arrow and Wonder Woman. Heavily involved in the cut scenes and dialog are Batman and Superman. Catwoman and Harley Quinn turn up before long, too. All of those have extremely well-known actors associated with them and everyone expects them to sound a certain way. They do sound that way here, too. Mostly.

So the game sounds good. Does it look good? Oh, yes. It looks great. I'm quite picky about interpretations of characters I know, let alone ones I like, and I have no complaints about any of these. 

In fact, I really like the whole aesthetic. The character art has the clean, sharp lines of a digital comic book and the UI and functional elements are very clear and easy to understand and use. The colors are really rich. I found the whole thing a pleasure to look at and listen to, all the time I was playing.

It's straight into the action when you start. Well, if you call upgrading a spare Batcave action. The core of the game appears to revolve around base building. The backup Batcave is massive and new rooms and even levels keep appearing. They all need to be upgraded, which makes up a lot of the gameplay. Later on there are shelters to be built on the surface, too. 

There's no tutorial as such and there doesn't need to be because the game constantly tells you what to press. All the gameplay I saw involves pressing something. I just sat there, following the prompts and upgrading whatever I was told to upgrade until eventually I opened the World map at Level 5, after which I was able to go outside and fight things.

Don't run away with the idea that that gave me freedom of movement. It's not an open world game. Reports come in of various situations that need handling, you select the next scenario from the map, teleport there and deal with it, then come back. 

And it works really well. There are schematic, three-dimensional representations of the area in which your characters stand like giants. You press a footstep icon and the game moves you to the next nodal point for an interaction or a fight and so the story proceeds to its conclusion. 

Fights themselves can be set to Auto, which of course I did. In all the time I played, none were even close. My team won easily. In Auto Mode you do still get to hit the buttons for the Ultimates, which in the early battles all trigger an animated cut scene. Very good they were, too, but I was just starting to think I might have seen enough of them when they stopped. 

I enjoyed the fights but the main reason I kept on playing was the story. It's nothing special - in my experience, super-hero stories in games almost never are - but it's not bad. There's the big invasion plot and a subplot involving who might have taken over the Joker's gang. 

The dialog is there or thereabouts in keeping with the characters as I know them and the plotlines, while familiar from about a gazillion other comic book tales, are engaging. Well, it they are if you like this sort of thing. Which, self-evidently, I do.

Since it's a mobile game, its fundamental purpose is to separate you from your money but so far it seems reasonable about the way it tries to do it. There's a gacha system to get new heroes and upgrade the ones you have, for which you can spend money if you want, but it kept giving me endless currency to roll with. Or, rather, to open Mother Boxes, that being the skin they've given the mechanic. IYKYK.

At one point Krypto swoops into a fight to turn the tide, which seems a bit random until you realise he's the character they're plugging in the store right now. The game does prompt you to go buy him but doesn't hassle you when you don't. 

The other way it wants you to pay for your fun is by speeding it up. Of course it is. Upgrades to the myriad rooms in your base all have timers. A lot of them are very short. Like two seconds short. A few, though, are a lot longer. 

The longest I saw was fifteen minutes. You can pay to speed that up. I didn't. I just tabbed out and did something else until it was over.

There's a lot more to it. A lot more. In common with most modern games (This one dates from 2025.) it's insanely busy. I'm not even going to attempt to talk about any of that. If I end up playing it for a while, maybe I'll come back to it when I understand more.

For now, though, I can say that I'm pleased to have been introduced to DC: Dark Legion and I don't at all feel I've wasted my day playing it. I had fun. 

If it will run on my phone, I might install it and play it there. I only have one good game on my phone right now - Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. I could do with another.

I just hope it's not really an 8GB install on Android though...