You know how we call it Project M because it makes Brawl play like Melee? We should start calling this game Project B because good fucking god.

Playing this game, there's a constant question which chips away at your mind. That question being: "What was the dev team doing for a year?" I'm not even trying to be mean, genuinely, what the hell happened? Everything is worse now. If 2022 MVS felt like being underwater, it now feels like you're in outer fucking space. Not to mention the insane balance changes made where the rich get richer, and support characters now have no reason to exist (except if you're Steven Universe and you can loop your down air into itself a billion times).
Well, I have the answer to that question, and that is because the allure of the shiny new UE5 was just to powerful, so they remade the entire game in said engine, meaning that any iota of a chance the game had of running on a low end computer, or the PS4, or ANY XBOX AT ALL was thoroughly dashed. The game barely worked on my laptop, which makes sense, as it's not the most powerful piece of equipment out there, but when I decided to infect my poor roommate's Xbone with the virus that is Multiversus, the game had severe input delay and ran at a jittery 20-30 fps in singles. Don't even get me started on 2v2's, it felt like I was trying to march in sand in an already sluggish game. All this for a game which looks less impressive than your average Wii U game, and it probably could've, but the need for "innovation" (and to bump up console/pc part sales) leaves everyone else in the dirt.

Relatively, that flaw is more forgiveable, but what really makes me angry is all the scummy monetization, and grinding that's present. If I had to give Multiversus any praise, it would be for letting use any character in training mode, whether you bought them or not. Unironically this is a really good feature, and should be implemented in every fighting game ever made, which makes it all the more infuriating that they just completely removed it in the relaunch. Yep. All gone. Only thing that's left of it is a gutted training mode on par with Smash 64. Say goodbye to knowing what a character does before you spend your hard earned fighter coins on them. Fighter coins which you can no longer get from completing a match. Gold is also out of the picture, instead being split up into 2 currencies, so you don't have to use fighter money for perks. This would be a cool addition, if fighter currency wasn't as rare as it was. Daily quests are extremely finite, so the one of the two real ways to get them is to deal with the monotonous single player mode which will often throw you a curve ball in the form of missions which require you to bring a friend, and once was bad enough, I'm not making a fellow human being play Multiversus ever again. The other comes from the Battle Pass and character levels, both of which take forever to progress. For reference I played this game for 5 hours too long, basically only playing as Jason (the only good part about this game now) and I only got him to level 5, and the Battle Pass to level 6. This accounting for the fact that not every reward is fighter coins, and is mostly just dump rewards like emojis, badges, and more battle pass exp. The new only character I was able to buy was Superman which I mostly attribute to the veteran bonus. Anybody with a brain can see that this is just a ploy to get people to shell out even more cash for the premium currency (able to buy basically anything). Turning a game that already had shaky business practices into an even greedier, even grindier, and even less playable mess is absolutely infuriating. I don't care if the game was free, the precious seconds I burnt away in both the beta and this newer worse beta is too much for a fighting game that doesn't even have local play!