Invincible Vs review – one of the most deftly designed fighting games in years

The sentence: “An Amazon television show video game tie-in” is about as big a red flag as a two star hygiene rating on a kebab van. You would not be at fault for looking at Invincible Vs with narrowed eyes. However, would you believe it, Invincible Vs is an exceptionally enjoyable game. Not only does it do wonders as an adaption, it might just be one of the best fighting games released in recent years.

Invincible Vs may at first glance seem to have been crafted by fresh hands at Quarter Up, a relatively new subsidiary of Walking Dead and Before Your Eyes publisher Skybound Games. While this is partially true, a golden lode of talent lies foundational there, with many developers from the 2013 Killer Instinct team present for another round. If you’ve not played that eighth generation classic, know that its connection to Invincible Vs is a genuine stamp of quality.

Here’s the basic topline pitch for Invincible Vs. It’s a 3v3 fighting game where you’re free to pick from a cast of 18 characters from the Amazon animation and comic book series. The game features the usual selection of modes and unlockables, including an arcade mode, story mode, offline and online multiplayer battles and a slender but passable training mode. It is laden with fan service and bloody brawls. But, given the presence of series voice actors and direct involvement of comic creator Robert Kirkman, it’s got a gleam often absent from many video game tie-ins of the past.

It’s worth emphasising this up front: Invincible Vs has merit for more than just fans of the series. You can practically smell Killer Instinct’s soul in Invincible Vs. The game is a heavy, mighty thing. ‘Game feel’ is a treacherous, ethereal thing. You need to feel heft behind big attacks, otherwise explosive moments can lose their lustre. But too much, and you fall into the spike pit where some of the older Mortal Kombat games lurk, those clunky, irksome fighters of the past where each punch feels as if submerged in cement.

Invincible Vs hits the bullseye. Every big strike, every super, practically kicks back through the controller. This all comes down to a beautiful alliance between excellent animation work, audio design, and snappy controls. This is crucial for any good fighting game; it’s ultimately the glue that keeps people playing for months to come. The simple act of having your big beefy space alien slap and slam other characters feels wonderful and devilishly moorish.

Invincible Vs may not be the most graphically intensive of the genre, but it does evoke the comic book style in a 3D engine eloquently. Quarter Up’s artists have not shied away from vibrancy in this game, nor should they have. Each character pops off the screen, attacks are complimented with comic-style motion lines that further emphasise the action. It can be a hard thing transitioning a 2D universe into a 3D engine, many games have struggled with this over the years, but Quarter Up has managed to make the transition without many perceivable faults.

This is good news for those with particular favourites from the series, as they have all been brought into the video game medium with a loving touch. Some, dare I say, have been expanded upon in a fashion that enhances their presence in the Amazon show: a feat worth applauding. The 18 character spread at launch is bountiful, each with distinct quirks meaning the vast majority of players will find at least one character who will tickle their fancies. Invincible himself is the game’s equivalent of Ryu, not in the sense that he has a fireball and a traditional uppercut, rather that he’s the jack-of-all-trades against which all other characters are measured. He can fly, close the distance quickly, and take advantage of the slightest of errors with ruinous combos. His moves list is a sales pitch for the whole game – lots of movement, lots of aggression.

If he sounds a bit vanilla to you, Quarter Up does get inventive with the rest of the cast. This I believe is partially due to necessity, many Invincible characters are variations of hulking, shredded, flying brawlers. This, with a less capable developer,could steer Invincible Vs into an adaption of Muscle Insider, but thankfully creative minds won out.

Take Lucan and Monster Girl. Lucan is a burly Viltrumite from space. The poor guy is lacking the luscious locks of Thula or the Conquest’s robot arm, and yet within the game he’s a Zangief-esque grappler with powerful aerial attacks meant to break open an opponent’s defensive. Monster Girl in the show spends a lot of time smacking people about, but hey, so does most of the cast. Here Quarter Up has transformed her too into a heavy-body grappler, but put more emphasis on heavy punches and pummeling enemies into the corner. The developers have taken the original characters from the show and built upon what players will have seen as a foundation for more enjoyable, diverse fighters. They’ve pulled a “yes, and?” to excellent effect.

Those who have fallen back in love with a particular fighter will, I’m afraid, have to grapple with the learning curve inherent to the genre. Invincible Vs is a 3v3 tag fighter, which inevitably and unavoidably brings additional complexity to an already daunting genre. There are no motion inputs present here, a lowering of the genre barriers I’ve begrudgingly had to accept in recent years. The idea that by removing motion inputs players will be more willing to have their head blown off by the intrinsic complexities of a tag fighter – ambiguous attacks coming from “above, below, left… no wait, is it right?” – is a premise Riot Games’ 2XKO utterly stripped from me

However while other fighting game developers have spent much effort trying to circumvent the learning curve by oversimplifying mechanics, Quarter Up has intelligently built in motivators for natural learning. There is an auto-combo; you can mash light punches and your character will perform a basic string of attacks. However, this isn’t the crutch it appears to be, thanks to the combo meter. As your combo gets longer, the bar fills up more, eventually forcing your opponent to fall out of it when the bar is filled. It’s a built-in limiter meant to keep nastier combo routes in check. But here’s the rub: using the auto combo fills the bar up more than if you had performed it manually.

So you’re incentivised to learn your manual combos as soon as possible. That, or you can make use of the game’s mechanics to reduce this combo meter. By tagging in one of your other characters mid-combo, you take a chunk off the combo meter, allowing for more damage. Either way, the accessibility tools act as a natural pathway to learning the game. Smart!

Invincible Vs also uses violence intelligently. It’s a strange sentence to read, I know, but hear me out. The developers know their fanbase is keen to revel in gory moments: the game’s opening cutscene starts with some guy getting caught in the crossfire of a superhero brawl, his intestines splayed across the inside of his ruined car. It’s an Invincible game, and part of the furniture. It doesn’t take the Mortal Kombat approach though, giving out violent delights freely to those who win a fight and can remember a basic string of inputs. Instead, gory finishers are achieved by taking out an enemy character with a super move.

Why does this actually matter? Well, it’s a carrot meant to tease casual players into engaging with its mechanics, and naturally improve. Using a super move as a combo ender is a handy rule of thumb that will teach newcomers how to get more damage out of their combos, so offering these brutal finishers under these conditions is clever. It should help people stick around to play Invincible Vs for the joys present in the actual gameplay, rather than Mortal Kombat where a significant portion of the playerbase just look up fatalities on YouTube when the game comes out.

Not dumbing down the core of the game allows Invincible Vs to revel in its 3v3 nature, making the game a brutal relay race of sorts where characters soar in to grab the baton and beat your opponent over the head with it. It lands right in that golden spot between modernising the genre and staying true to its roots, which I think is just dandy.

However, it must be said it’s not all sunshine and rainbows over here. The story mode is very short, we’re talking about roughly an hour and change from start to finish, as long as you don’t get stuck during a fight. While I can obviously step back and see that Quarter Up does not have the resources a NetherRealm or Capcom has, it is still worth mentioning for those who were hoping for an expansive delve into the Invincible universe. To me it was very much like a filler episode, a chunk of fan-service that allows for diehards to see how certain characters who may not have interacted much in the show or comic would have done at a particular point in the overall narrative arc. It’s a quick snack- gorge on it if you desire but don’t expect much actual sustenance from it here.

One final point of praise however is the online multiplayer. Having now spent several days playing against other players I can safely say this has been wonderfully implemented. I played first with a hard-wired ethernet connection and it all seemed flawless, but it was better still when I unplugged the cable and relied on my bargain bin dumpster wifi connection it still played pretty darn good. This is increasingly becoming the industry standard, but we’re still close enough to the Xbox 360 and prior era of netcode nightmares where this sort of quality can be appreciated. I would have liked an alternative mode for online play to mix things up a little, even if it is a more casual inclusion, but hey, maybe they can add something like that in the future.

As much as Invincible Vs could do with just a tiny bit more in some areas, I feel this is probably the best tag fighter I’ve played in years. For the size of the team making it, for the clear love they had in adapting the source material, and for the execution itself, it’s a doozy.

A copy of Invincible Vs was provided for this review by Skybound Games.