It doesn’t take seven years of tertiary education to understand the appeal behind superheroes. We’ve all daydreamed of commanding an extraordinary ability whether it be invisibility, teleportation, control of the elements or flight. My own childhood superpower was the ability to self-destruct – something that, in the years since 2001, friends have been quick to point out is neither heroic nor limited to the imagination of Stan Lee. My version didn’t even include 75 virgins.

Enter DC Universe Online: A purpose-built conduit to indulge your childhood fantasies or herodom or villainy. Racing through the sinister streets of Gotham under a dark sky ablaze with the Bat signal or exploring the considerably brighter Metropolis is both a joy and a triumph of art direction.

It’s a beautiful world, but also a world in turmoil. The game begins with an introduction video that could easily be watched alongside Saturday morning cartoons. Herein you’ll witness a battle between the forces of good and evil, and the eventual triumph of Lex Luthor and his villains. Yet even as they gloat it becomes apparent that Brainiac has been planning to take sole dominion of the world and in the wake of this battle his plans are laid bare.

Luthor, now realising the folly of destroying so many powerful heroes, has doomed the world and chooses to travel back through time to warn both the heroes and villains of their impending fate. With him Luthor brings exobytes, stolen from Brainiac, that have the ability to foster superpowers in anyone. With these exobytes and the training given by famous DC heroes and villains, an army of superpowered warriors take to the streets. This is where you step in.

Character customisation, the first step in your superpowered career, lacks some of the cosmetic variety seen in other MMOs, though once you mix body types with costume choices and a personal three-tone colour scheme it’s unlikely you will run into a carbon copy of yourself.

While it is possible to race through creation and choose an archetype based on a famous hero or villain like the Joker or Wonder Woman, you also have a wide variety of choices to make your character unique.

First up is your personal travel type. Here you choose between the three ways of moving around the world. Super-speed lets you rocket around the city, up walls and across anything you can think of. Acrobatics has you loping around, scaling walls and grappling around the city-scape. Guess what Flight lets you do.

Each travel type has its own skill tree to level up as you progress through the game, with both offensive and defensive skills to learn. For example, the Super-speed tree includes the ability to run around a target at high speed temporarily stunning them, or vibrating your molecules at such a high speed that you can deflect or phase through attacks.

Weapon choice, another customisation, lets you choose what your character will be using to ramp up combos and generally beat on anything that gets in your way. Choices such as martial arts, single-handed and dual-handed melee weapons, or two-handed weapons will put you in melee range. Rifles, bows, hand blasters and akimbo-pistols have you at range. Again, this choice comes with a levelling tree that unlocks new combos and character statistic bonuses – as well as being able to unlock other weapon choices at later levels.

But the most important customisations are those related to your power set, and each of the available choices has two roles. Ice and Fire powers can be used either for tanking or damage. Heroes with either Mental powers (Telekinesis, mind control, and so on) or Gadgets (think Batman or the Joker) get to choose between a damage role and a control role. Control includes both general crowed control party power regeneration to allow your your team mates to continue firing off their special abilities. To round out the choices Sorcery and Nature have both damage and healing facets.

After these decisions are made, and once you’ve chosen whether to be a villain or a hero, you’re thrown into the introduction and general combat tutorial. This is where DC Universe Online differentiates itself from most MMO content available.

DC Universe Online was built and released for both PC and PlayStation 3 simultaneously, and because of this, the controls for PC feel like the worst kind of port. Your mouse is on constant free look, there is no cursor unless you’re looking at a menu and you cannot target enemies with it. Instead, you’ll gamble as you hit tab and hope to lock on the right enemy. Because of this combat is occasionally reduded to a series of bad camera angles and poor targeting.