How has it taken this long to get an Invincible game?
Okay, so technically there was the PC-based visual novel Invincible Presents: Atom Eve, which by all accounts is pretty good. And there was also Ubisoft’s idle game Invincible: Guarding the Globe, which is still supported today.
But without being snobby, we mean a proper game, like fighter Invincible VS.
Developed by new studio Quarter Up – founded by veterans from Double Helix, the now-defunct dev best known for resurrecting Rare’s Killer Instinct – this is a gritty 3v3 fighter inspired by Robert Kirkman’s classic coming of age comic book and its uber-popular Amazon Prime adaptation.
While its art style deviates from each of the aforementioned, it still feels derivative of the 2003 Image Comics classic; Invincible’s iconic blue-and-yellow suit and bug-eyes really pop on the screen, while Omni-Man’s looming presence is perfectly captured thanks to his huge, intimidating character model.
In many ways, this is the perfect franchise for a fighting game: superhero-on-superhero action occurs with regularity in the comic books, and here it takes centre stage, while the slice of life aspects of the source material are brushed to the side.
This is a very modern fighting game, too, subscribing to a more contemporary control scheme like that in, say, 2XKO. While a more traditional, Street Fighter format exists, it feels like the game wants you to play with its simplified setup.
That means no complicated quarter circle inputs – ironic considering the dev’s name – and a system that assigns Light, Medium, and Heavy attacks to the Square, Triangle, and Circle buttons respectively. A direction combined with the Cross/X button triggers a special move.
You can expend metre to charge up these attacks with the R2 button, but the real depth comes from the tag mechanic and how you can use it to bait your opponents into traps.
For example, you can use active tags to follow-up combos with one character into another, changing up your squad and stunning your opponent with deadly, unbreakable chains. But with the right timing from your adversary, these can be countered, leaving you wide open to a whupping.
The real skill comes from knowing when to tag and when to feint, coaxing your opponent into a riposte and leaving them defenceless.
There are some other tools you can use to turn the tables. The Assist Breaker gobbles up your metres, but gives you an opportunity to break up a pummelling, with the real consequence being you can’t tag for at least ten seconds.
Meanwhile, the Heroic Strike allows you to eat an attack when timed right, and turn defence into offence.
We’ll admit, even in all our time writing the review, we never quite got comfortable using all these systems in high-stakes online scenarios, but we can certainly appreciate how the depth will scale to a higher level of professional play.
For us, we really liked the pace of matches. While 3v3 fights sound like they may be a slog, health bars evaporate fast. Each character feels like a legitimate superhero, whether it’s Rex Splode’s acrobatics, Battle Beast’s sheer brawn, or Atom Eve’s shoto-style ranged attacks.
Many of the voice actors from the original show return, including importantly J.K. Simmons as Omni-Man. The game also introduces all-new character Ella Mental, designed crucially by creator Kirkman.
You don’t really need to be a fan of Invincible to enjoy this, but it certainly helps. Some of the Viltrumites, like Thula, Anissa, and Lucan, don’t feel particularly visually distinct – at least not to the degree you’d expect from a fighting game. They, of course, all have their own movesets and roles in combat.
Some of the stages feel a bit flat, too; while we love the destructible New York and Titan’s Penthouse, others like the Stasis Room feel a bit indistinct and uninteresting.
With a roster of 18 characters to master, the launch day offering does feel big enough, but it’s frustrating to see fan favourites like The Immortal restricted to post-release DLC.
The single player slate is also slim.
While the traditional arcade ladders from classic fighting games return, escalating in difficulty and duration, solo play is underpinned by a now-expected cinematic story mode, which plots an original tale involving all of the characters from the game.
The animation during cutscenes, leveraging a kind of stop-motion style inspired by the likes of Spider-Verse, is genuinely outstanding – but the story feels like a weak excuse to string several battles together, and you can roll credits on the standard difficulty in little more than an hour.
Really it leaves the multiplayer to carry the package, which is often where the longevity stems from in these kinds of fighters anyway. Unlocks are plentiful and the netcode, sporting rollback, feels rock solid based on our pre-release testing. Of course things could easily get rocky depending on when and where you play.
But overall, we’ve enjoyed our time with this game: the combat crunches and looks appropriately grotesque at times, while a great soundtrack from electronic duo The Glitch Mob really adds some energy to the action.
