Strap on your utility belt and don your face mask—the DC Universe Online beta has arrived. Sony Online Entertainment has finally opened up a server for testing that allows players to take up sides with villains like the Joker and Catwoman or heroes like Superman and the Green Lantern and play through a portion of the new MMORPG.

In DC Universe Online, the world is faced with a crisis—an invasion by Brainiac once all the superheroes and villains have killed each other off. Lex Luthor, who witnesses the invasion, travels back through time to warn his new allies, Batman and Superman among them, and to spread Brainiac's tiny "exobots" through the general population, giving them superhuman powers. He hopes to create a super-army that will be able to stop Brainiac in time.

A citizenry of heroes

Character creation allows players to make one of these new superheroes or supervillains. Your character can be modeled after an existing DC character, or made up from scratch. The process allows you to choose your character's method of transportation, such as flight or acrobatics, fighting style, personality, and costume colors, as well as features like size and hairstyle. While not quite as extensive as the character creation in a game like City of Heroes, the options allow for plenty of diversity; no two characters on the test servers ever looked similar.

Every new character begins by escaping from Brainiac's ship, which is a nice way to introduce players to the style and pace of their characters' fighting moves and movement. The fighting in DCUO is very different from the standard MMORPG system of target something, hit it until it dies, collect rewards, repeat.

Rather, you will often find yourself in the middle of groups of attackers; attacking with guns, knives, or knuckles depending on your fighting style; and breaking stuns and integrating special moves to level your enemies. The combat is very similar to that of Batman: Arkham Asylum, in that you often have to manage groups of enemies. The targeting and direction of your swings largely take care of themselves, allowing you to plan a more complicated series of attacks. It is possible to lock on to one enemy but, in the lower levels, it's rarely necessary.

Once off Brainiac's ship, you find yourself in your faction's safe house in either Gotham City (the Tap Room for villains) or Metropolis (a police station for heroes). Here you get your first quests, as well as introductions to the mailing system and vendors.

It's dangerous to go alone, take this

The questing system in DCUO is fairly pared down. You won't get more than a couple quests at a time, at least before level 9, where the beta ended for us. The missions keep a pretty tight focus on the issue at hand: Brainiac and his minions. While your safe house is a questing hub of sorts, the structure of the quests lead you around to new quest-givers at large in the city, and only occasionally require you to return to that individual to collect your reward.

The quests are largely in the "kill x number of bad guys" theme, with the occasional interaction with SWAT vehicles to free your two-bit criminal friends if you're a villain, or rescuing a fellow superhero if you're a good guy. The settings look fantastic, despite the somewhat rote nature of the missions themselves.

Gotham is dark and dank, with most of the light coming from neon signs on streets bordered by tall buildings that you can climb or fly to the top of, providing rest and vantage points. Metropolis, on the other hand, is bright and sunny, with light glinting off its skyscrapers. Either can serve as your starting point, depending not on which side you're on, but rather the nature of your character. For example, a Batman-like hero and Catwoman-like villain would both start in Gotham, but in different sections, while a Wonder Woman-type hero starts in Metropolis.

The cities are huge, but thanks to the traveling mechanics, they're easy enough to get around. Quests are marked on the minimap, as are quest-givers, and an arrow on the minimap's border will point you to your currently active quest, as you can only track one at a time. Quest rewards include money, experience, and equippable items like belts, capes, and shirts that automatically match your base outfit's color scheme... so you will always be stylin'.

Of course, being a beta, the game isn't without its frustrations—one quest failed to track for me and was asking me to find an unlabeled warehouse in Gotham's freight yard, when every looming, gray, vaguely Gothic building looks sort of like a warehouse. But there are no glaring problems, and all the big pieces of the game work well—everything loads very quickly, and the combat and movement mechanics are slick and really fun to use.

The DCUO beta exposes only a small part of the game, and many more aspects are still to come, like PvP, arena matches, and raids. The full release won't arrive until the first quarter of 2011, but we'll have more impressions as more levels are unlocked in the beta.