Some things just feel right. When I first laid eyes on Invincible VS, my thoughts were something along the lines of, “Yeah, that makes sense.” If you were going to choose a comic book to adopt into a fighting game, you could do a lot worse than Robert Kirkman’s magnum opus. It’s got everything you need for a tag fighter: bone-crushing hits, a big cast to draw from, a cool art style, plenty of unique superpowers that can easily be converted into special moves, the works. But Invincible VS has a secret weapon, too: its developer, Quarter Up. That name might not be familiar to you yet – they’re a new studio – but they’re anything but rookies. Several members of the 40+ person development team played a core role in the development of 2013’s Killer Instinct, and you can feel that influence. Seeing Invincible VS is one thing, but when I sat down to play it and speak with members of the team, I knew I was among fellow sickos – and I mean that in the most complimentary way.
One of the problems with previewing a fighting game is that you never have enough time with it to really dig into its systems. This is an incredibly complex genre; every time you sit down with a new fighting game, it’s a new experience. Some of it is like riding a bike. Hold back to block. Your assist button will also tag if you hold it. That sort of thing. But a lot of it is new. You gotta learn your button layout; you gotta figure out how combos work, what kind of defensive systems you have, what your special moves do, all kinds of stuff. If I had my way, I would have spent hours in Invincible VS’s training mode just tinkering with teams and learning how things worked. As it was, I only had about an hour. But even with such limited time, I left feeling like I knew what Invincible VS was by the time I put my fightstick down.
Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: Invincible VS is still very, very early in development. It absolutely nails the look and general vibe of the show, mostly because Quarter Up is working directly with the folks who made it. There's still a lot left to do (the build I played didn't have proper lip syncing yet, for instance), but if you’re worried about whether this will honor the source material, don't be.
Invincible is a brutal, bloody, often shocking story, and that’s reflected in how the characters interact on-screen. If you’re the one dishing out the hurt, your character will quite literally get blood on their hands. It just isn't theirs. Meanwhile, if you’re the one getting hit, it'll be obvious. If you’ve been blocking with your face, the bruises will make sure everyone knows it. That pristine costume will look like you’ve lost a fight with a lawnmower; the rest of you will resemble a prizefighter who just went 12 rounds with a heavyweight… or just Mark himself after he’s been fighting his dad. Invincible VS is far from the first fighting game to do real-time battle damage, but it looks great, and I appreciated how I could tell who was winning without looking at the health gauge at the top of the screen, and that it matched the show’s visual language. There’s a lot of blood here, folks. And hey, if you end a fight with the right special or super move (and we’ll dig into the gameplay in a second, I promise), you can pop Atom Eve’s head off or turn Bulletproof into a series of limbs missing a torso.
And it’s not just the characters absorbing all this damage. The environments will feel the impact of these super-powered brawls, too. There’s less of a visible impact on the moon because… well, the moon is kinda empty. But in a city? You’re gonna see buildings falling down, cars getting totaled, streets getting torn up, the works. Superheroes trying to kill each other generally doesn't go well for anyone (or anything) else in the immediate area. And hey, just because you start a brawl in a city street doesn’t mean it’ll end there. You can absolutely punch somebody so hard they break orbit (or end up on another, different stage).
Okay, so the presentation stuff is really cool, but the appeal of any fighting game is the actual fighting. I didn’t have enough time to really dig into Invincible VS’s core systems, but a fighting game can’t just have smart design choices backing it. Landing hits has to feel good, too. And Invincible VS has that part down pat. In a lot of ways, it resembles the tag fighters of yesteryear, but there are some unique twists here. You’ve got your standard light, medium, and heavy attacks, as well as a light autocombo for folks like me who were just starting out. Special moves are their own button, but Invincible VS doesn't use motion inputs. You choose your special kind of like you do in Super Smash Bros: pick a direction and press that special button.
So the core gameplay is a lot like Marvel or Dragon Ball FighterZ. Lights go into mediums, which go into heavies (though you can do things like switching between crouching and standing normals to spice things up and open up new routes), and down and heavy gets you a launcher for an air combo. You can also enhance your special moves for special properties and extra hits if you’ve got the meter, and bone-crushing, human-smushing, jaw-removing supers for when you’re ready to cash out (and see a slick animation that will likely leave your opponent getting literally scraped off the area floor; plus, they’re easy to do. Just press heavy and special at the same time, and you’re golden). Standard tag fighter stuff, but what makes Invincible VS cool are the core systems.
Some of them you’ve seen before: you’ve got a pushblock to get people off of you, snapbacks to bring a damaged backliner back in so you can keep pouring up the hurt, defensive saves where you can bring in another character to save the one getting comboed, assists for each character that isn't on the field (this is a tag game, after all), ground bounces to set up interesting combo opportunities, and the like. There are way, way too many options to dig into here, but if you’re worried that the simplified control scheme means Invincible VS might not have the juice, let me alleviate that concern for you right now. Once I got put into a high/low mixup I blockstun by Bulletproof’s rekka, I knew this was a game for degenerates (which, again, I saw as a compliment).
One thing I will dig into is how Invincible VS determines combo length. As you hit your opponent, you’ll see a meter build up. Fill it, and your combo will end because your opponent will fall out. This means that while basic combos in Invincible VS aren’t short, they’re not as long the ones you'll find in Marvel 3 or Dragon Ball FighterZ. You’ll be out of that combo and back in the action (or dead) before your next birthday.
But there is a way around that. Tag in one of your other characters, and you’ll reset part of that combo meter, allowing you to lay additional smacketh down. Getting the most out of your characters requires spending meter or cycling through your team. Neither of these concepts is new, but I appreciate what Quarter Up is doing to make Invisible VS unique. I also like how different the characters feel. The build I played only had four fighters to choose from, but Bulletproof and Thula quickly stood out to me, though neither Invincible nor Atom Eve felt bad. Part of the fun of a tag fighter is building a team that works for you; these characters already feel quite different from one another, and that’s a good thing. Thula slicing you to pieces with her hair? Rad. Bulletproof calling you a cab? Iconic.
The other thing I appreciate are the little touches, from the unique intro dialogue between the characters (this is becoming more and more rare in modern fighters) and the Dragon Ball FighterZ-style clashes when a new character comes in. These serve to reset the playing field and let you take a breath, but there’s also more ubique dialogue here, too. I love stuff like this, and I'm happy Quarter Up has embraced it wholeheartedly.
When I set my arcade stick down after about an hour with Invincible VS, I felt pretty good. Trying a new fighting game is a lot like driving a new car for the first time. You’ve got a general idea of what you’re getting, but the devil’s in the details. I left pretty pleased with my test drive. Quarter Up still has a lot of work to do, but I can’t wait to kick Invincible VS’s tires for real and see what she can do on the track. Fighting games are a tricky business, but it’s also easy to tell when they’re on the right track. Invincible VS has a killer team behind it, the tools and the resources they need to do the comic and the show justice, and a lot of good ideas. Let’s just hope they can pull off a superhero landing, and look good doing it.
