Invincible VS Review – Punching Above Its Weight

Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5

Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Publisher:
Skybound Games

Developer:
Quarter Up

Rating:
Mature

The 2D fighting genre, once thought to be a dying category, now flourishes thanks to major franchises and underground hits. Invincible VS straddles the line of those two classifications, bringing a red-hot IP into the space by way of a new studio made up of fighting-game veterans. The result is a 3v3 tag fighter with rock-solid mechanics, strong production values, and a fun, if flawed, story mode, enabling Invincible VS to go blow-for-blow with many of its contemporaries right out of the gate.

Invincible VS Video Review:

True to its source material, Invincible VS includes fistfights that often result in multiple characters drenched in blood and a superpowered roster chock-full of larger-than-life personalities. This is further accentuated by some of the show’s star-studded voice cast, including J.K. Simmons, reprising their roles for the game, or soundalikes doing admirable impressions. And that goes a long way, as each character has specific verbal interactions with other fighters on the roster, lending to the overarching cinematic feel of the matches.

Though many of the characters – particularly the suite of Viltrumites – possess similar powers, developer Quarter Up excelled at making each fighter on the roster feel unique. Invincible and Dupli-Kate’s speedy, in-your-face rushdown style is great for dealing with big bodies like Conquest or Lucan. However, mid-range characters like Thula gave me fits until I swapped to a bully character like Battle Beast. As you build a team of three, this game of counters and contrasts ably encourages you to bring a well-rounded squad into every battle.

As a Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat player of three decades, I initially struggled to grasp Invincible VS’s brand of combo-focused, tag-based fighting. Thankfully, after spending time in the helpful tutorial mode, I was rattling off combos, landing Heroic Strikes, chaining through Active Tags, and sending characters across the world with Arena Shifts.

Thanks to a modern approach to its control scheme, which emphasizes strategy over input commands, improvising combos (or using the light attack’s auto-combo system) and landing devastating, cinematic ultimates foster an incredibly approachable fighting experience. And the ability to break combos through tags is a novel evolution of the stellar Killer Instinct-inspired formula. However, the Counter Tag system can feel inconsistent (unless you’re the AI), and certain characters sometimes miss during combos, creating small annoyances when locked into tense battles.

Arcade-style ladders let you fight through multiple opponents across various difficulties, with the reward of brief, largely underwhelming endings for each character. Despite that, I enjoyed fighting through these towers with different teams to hone my skills and strategies for when I jumped online. I love the online lobby system, which lets several players join a room, jump in and out of matchups, and even spectate other fights. And during my online matches on pre-release servers, I only experienced minor hitches during play.

Though I love playing one-off matches, climbing the arcade ladders, and hanging out in a lobby, my favorite part of any modern fighter is its story mode. And with my love for the Invincible franchise, I was highly anticipating what Quarter Up was pitching as essentially a bonus episode of the show. Even after playing through the story mode twice, I’m still blown away by the production values of the awe-inspiring cutscenes. Large-scale action scenes consisting of the full 18-character roster are wildly entertaining.

However, like many of the genre’s story modes, the narrative is simply a flimsily disguised mechanism to provide justification for why you’re mashing your various action figures into each other. The story falls short of being a compelling adventure, and I soon felt like I was simply going through the motions to see the next spectacle cutscene rather than caring about where the story was going. And without spoiling too much, the extremely short campaign ends in an unsatisfying fashion.

With plans for post-launch content already announced, Invincible VS is likely to only improve as its lifespan progresses, which could certainly address some of the current shortcomings. However, with an already solid foundation built upon approachability and personality, Invincible VS is easy to recommend to both seasoned fighting games fans and Invincible enthusiasts.