Jason Voorhees and Agent Smith from Friday the 13th and The Matrix respectively were recently revealed as playable characters in MultiVersus. While Jason will be playable when MultiVersus relaunches on May 28, Agent Smith will become available later as part of Season 1 DLC.
As such, Player First Games has released Jason Voorhees’ gameplay trailer for MultiVersus. This provides us with a good look at what the character is capable of.
The beginning of the trailer feels like an actual horror movie experience. Velma, Gizmo, and Finn can be heard wandering around in the dark with a flashlight before they run into Jason Voorhees. Unfortunately for these characters, they end up getting a real close inspection of Jason’s machete.
Following this, Jason can be seen tormenting the rest of the roster using attacks involving his machete and axe. He’s even seen trapping an opponent in a sleeping bag and crushing another with a folding bed, which are references to the movies.
It’s also demonstrated that Jason has a shoulder ram attack, a stomp, and several grab motions. Jason even has access to a teleport in MultiVersus.
Check out the trailer below:
Of course, I should note that none of this is actually a surprise to me. Shortly before Banana Guard’s reveal, I was invited by Player First Games and Warner Bros., along with other journalists and influencers, to partake in a three-day event of playing MultiVersus early.
During this early preview of MultiVersus, Joker, Banana Guard, Jason, and everyone else that was previously playable during the beta period were all usable. Agent Smith was also secretly revealed then, but he’s still an unknown factor when it comes to his gameplay.
Over the course of this three-day event, I put in about 10 hours into playing the game. I would’ve played a little more than that, but there were some major problems on the second day — more on that later.
With all of this in mind, I have quite a few impressions about MultiVersus that I’d like to share before May 28 rolls around. Let’s get into it!
Jason was the character I played the most during my sneak peek at the game. I was absolutely shocked upon learning that he’d be playable and wanted to really get a deep understanding on how the character played.
First off, I have to give the developers a lot of credit for how well Jason in portrayed in MultiVersus. A lot of his attacks do the Friday the 13th series justice while also feeling very fun to use.
Even though blocking isn’t really a thing in MultiVersus, Jason plays very similarly to your typical grappler archetype. He wants to get in close and really lay a smackdown on opponents.
The third hit of his ground forward attack actually has Jason grabbing the opponent. From here, the player can choose to either throw the enemy forward or backwards.
His grounded up special attack also grabs the opponent and allows Jason to toss his victim either forward or backwards. This is a decent anti-air tool that can potentially lead into combos if the opponent doesn’t react fast enough.
As cool as Jason is, I, unfortunately, don’t think he was particularly strong when I played him. In fact, I’m fairly certain that he was one of the weaker characters in the game.
Jason is mostly a grounded character that’s a fair bit worse while airborne. That’s not a good start for a game in which characters are generally trying to stay airborne as much as possible.
However, Jason’s biggest problem is that he is so unbelievably slow. This makes sense considering who Jason is and how he’s the second biggest character, after Iron Giant, in MultiVersus right now.
Surprisingly and sadly, Jason also has a hard time securing kills, even against opponents with over 100% damage. I thought his most reliable kill moves were his jumping forward attack, dash attack, and grounded neutral attack, but his air up special and air down attack deserve honorable mentions.
The attacks utilizing the sleeping bag and the folding bed have insane amounts of start up and recovery. I felt like I was getting punished for hitting opponents with the folding bed if I hit with it too early. At the very least, I was put in a disadvantageous position by hitting with it due to its recovery time.
Jason’s reach is also deceptively bad. It really didn’t help that it felt like Jason had hurtboxes on his weapons. Maybe I was just missing something about Jason’s kit, but it often felt difficult to beat opponents that I just felt were simply mashing buttons.
One saving grace for Jason is that he can charge his ground neutral special to convert some of his health into gray health. When he does this, he’s faster and his next attack will be more powerful.
Jason also has a passive effect that gives him armor whenever he has gray health. However, there are several problems with this mechanic that limit it in the most unfortunate ways.
Of course, there are armor breaking moves, but there are also plenty of moves that can just deal enough damage to overpower the gray health. Jason can actually charge this special until he has 20 gray health, but this won’t matter at all against some characters.
Also, it’s very important to note that Jason only has armor while he has gray health. This means, he loses the armor as soon as he tries to attack. In other words, the armor won’t do anything for the startup of Jason’s attacks.
To put it bluntly, the way I often used Jason’s armor was to simply walk up to opponents, intentionally let them hit me, and then punish them. If I pressed buttons before allowing myself to be hit, Jason would almost always lose exchanges due to the poor start up of his moves.
Smarter opponents, knowing how the mechanic worked, would just run away. Though Jason is faster in this state, he still has a difficult time trying to catch anyone, even with his teleport.
Jason ended up being a lot of fun despite how difficult he was to win with. I don’t know if the developers have any plans on buffing him before the game goes live, but I can only recommend Jason to the die-hard fans and to those that really seek a challenge.
Though he’s clearly intended to be the joke character of MultiVersus, Banana Guard is actually a lot of fun. He’s also the definition of simplicity due to the straightforwardness of his attacks.
I spent the second most amount of time playing Banana Guard during this special preview event. Despite how simple he was to play, he also felt extremely strong.
I’d wager a guess that Banana Guard is probably in need of some nerfs, either before the launch or shortly afterwards. Against most opponents, I was able to cleanly win with two or three stocks remaining relatively easily.
I was probably winning around 80-90% of my matches with Banana Guard, but the game explicitly hid my win rate from me so I can’t say for sure. Regardless, I felt like there was only one other player that I came across while playing as Banana Guard that I absolutely could not beat — unless he was playing Jason, which did happen a few times.
Banana Guard’s most oppressive move, was his grounded forward attack. It was actually possible to dodge forward after hitting with this, and sort of loop it into itself.
Although it might actually be escapable as there was one person who was seemingly able to DI (directional influence) up to get out of it. Either way, it was always easy to confirm into something strong with this as a combo starter.
Banana Guard’s aerial up attack was also really difficult for fighters to deal with. Combined with Banana Guard’s aerial up special, it was generally simple to KO opponents off the top. Depending on the situation, this was even possible to do with combos that began at 0% damage.
Overall, Banana Guard felt like more than just a joke character during the time that I played him as he was a real menace. Unless something changes about him before release, I suspect he’ll be a top tier that everyone will be able to use.
Admittedly, I didn’t spend any time playing Joker, but I got the general gist of what the character can do from playing against him plenty of times. On the character select screen, he’s recommended as the type of character that’s easy to pick up and play.
From what I can tell, Joker was really strong when he came to controlling horizontal space. He had plenty of advancing moves that were difficult to get out of the way of, but he wasn’t exactly a slouch at controlling vertical space either.
As one might expect from the Joker, this is a character with a lot of tricks since he had a number of moves that were capable of random outcomes. His mobility options and counter also make him really difficult to pin down at times. I found that Joker players were seemingly prone to circle camping, similar to Zero Suit Samus players in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
I heard from another player that Joker also had a sequence that could be looped, though I never had anyone attempt this sequence against me. From what I saw in the clip, this loop was a little more difficult than the one Banana Guard could pull off.
Aside from that one thing (which Warner Bros. is aware of), Joker felt like a balanced addition. He wasn’t too strong like Banana Guard, and he certainly wasn’t bad like Jason was.
Rifts is the new single player experience that will be playable in MultiVersus. There are regular fights as well as minigames to be had here.
This mode can offer small amounts of fun, though it’s honestly mostly a time waster. Still, it’s a relatively simple way to collect loot.
Each Rift campaign has a theme to it, but this usually doesn’t amount to much. For example, there’s a “Detectives Rift” campaign that effectively has Batman and Velma competing against one another to figure something out.
There are split paths you can take in the story, but it isn’t like the player is making any crucial choices here. The player doesn’t actually figure anything out during the detective segment. Instead, you just play through matches and minigames until the characters have that “aha moment” that leads to the final boss of that Rift.
The boss fight against the Joker was actually really interesting as it required the player to operate a cannon to shoot down his air balloon (if I remember correctly). Later, you’d have a fight against Gizmo as a boss that mostly just functioned as a normal battle with a few special rules.
Rifts can be a fun distraction, but it’s clear that the multiplayer is the focus anyhow.
There’s really not a lot for me to say about the online other than it was flawlessly implemented. I played over 100 matches (all 1v1) and never so much as experienced a single stutter, dropped input, or rollback.
It actually dawned on me a few days after the sneak peek that, for most of my time playing MultiVersus, that I had been playing online. I cannot stress enough that my online experience felt indistinguishable from playing offline, which is really saying something considering how online felt during the beta period.
From what I could tell, I was even playing opponents from other countries without anything even resembling lag. MultiVersus’ netcode was perfect. You have to actually experience it to believe it.
As mentioned before, the game kept disconnecting on the second day of the test, but that was apparently only because some settings were incorrectly set. Someone from Warner Bros. said that they made adjustments upon hearing multiple reports of the problem, and that was the end of the issue.
Funnily enough, even during this period, I was never actually disconnected during an actual match. This problematic setting only made it difficult to begin a match or play single player content.
If I’m being honest here, MultiVersus felt like it was in really rough shape during that beta phase. It was a beta, so it was understandable.
After playing the newest version of MultiVersus for three days, I now understand why the developers decided to take the game down in the first place. It feels like everything about MultiVersus has been rebuilt, and for the better.
Every character has new moves, include the new dash attack which gives everyone a new burst option. You can now also clearly see how many dodges you have available until you lose out on invincibility.
There no longer appears to be a “hit stun” decay notification that comes up when you use a move too many times. In general, the game just feels way more consistent and easier to keep up with.
MultiVersus is back after a long hiatus. The game’s not perfect quite yet, but it’s definitely one I intend to play more of after it’s released and I definitely recommend it to anyone who might’ve only had a mild interest in it before.