Multiversus Lets Me Beat Up Superman With LeBron James

I love crossovers/spinoffs, not joking. I think this began when I was a kid. One of my favorite shows was Happy Days, a goofy sitcom about the 50s, which spun-off into LaVerne and Shirley, another goofy show about the 50s. It then got weird with spinoffs involving an alien and an angel. I have also read comics my entire life, and those characters are always checking in on each other to boost sales and publicity.

But all that prepared me for the "everything is a shared universe" era pop culture is currently in.

Warner Bros' latest contribution to all this madness is Multiversus, a platform fighter that throws all its numerous properties against the digital wall to see what sticks. If you have ever had a favorite TV show or movie, it's probably represented in there somewhere. Thanks to LeBron James' appearance in Space Jam: A New Legacy, he is also a Warner Bros' character, kind of.

LeBron's combos could easily have been pulled from NBA 2K. He does shoulder checks to take space on the platform, and nearly all his moves involve using a basketball as a weapon. Dribble combos help keep an opponent off of you, and one of his counters to aerial attacks is spinning the b-ball on his finger Harlem Globetrotter style. If he loses the basketball, he turns into almost an entirely different character. Moves then involve LeBron-isms such as throwing chalk aloft, pounding his chest, and the infamous meme of him crying out in protest at one of the few times he didn't get a foul call.

The secondary moveset is more humorous than damaging, so in playing James you need to figure out how to get his basketball back quickly. It has a cooldown, or it reappears after any move makes contact with the opponent.

James goes toe-to-toe with the likes of Superman, Rick Sanchez, and Agent Smith of Matrix fame. It is exactly the fever dream that it sounds like. In playing LeBron James, I'm bringing a basketball to a gunfight and I love it.

I don't know if my years of experience playing basketball games give me any advantage in learning the character, but I begin every match by telling myself it does. Multiversus is free-to-play on PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.