Invincible VS Review: Great Combat, Thin Content

As two fists collide, the sheer force of their impact causes debris and millions of dollars to fly about in Titan’s penthouse. Conquest, the mad Viltrumite, relishes in this carnage, stating that he’ll turn his opponent, Robot, into a helmet. Conquest starts his barrage on the armored hero as he launches Robot up into the air. Conquest reels back, giving Robot one more moment to endure, only to see Battle Beast charge through the opening left by Conquest. With an exasperated “Seriously?” Omni-Man appears with such explosive force to knock both Conquest and Battle Beast away. Omni-Man proceeds to beat Battle Beast bloody, with his final blow turning the towering cat warrior into giblets. Crude, violent, and coarse, which is exactly what Invincible VS should be.

Invincible VS is a three-on-three versus-style fighting game that lets you step into the shoes of 18 characters from the Invincible universe, but that’s nearly all it is. I’m conflicted: on one hand, Invincible VS delivers exactly what it promised – a mechanically sound fighting game. Unfortunately, there isn’t much there besides that. The story mode clocks in at about an hour and wouldn’t even qualify as a short side story in the comic universe it resides in. I didn’t learn anything about the new character, Ella Mental, beyond the fact that she can scrap and is sassy, which describes most of the cast. Even characters like Omni-Man, who has an interesting position in the Invincible lore, are sidelined for a bog-standard “beat the bad guys” narrative. The arcade ladder ends with a cutscene that could’ve been an intro for that same arcade ladder. I went through each arcade ladder in part due to disbelief that the majority of the endings couldn’t just have been the equivalent of vague motivational TikToks, but they were. In the currently-airing Amazon series, Invincible is full of time travel, alternate dimensions, and general fiction silliness, so there’s no excuse for such a “nonstory” to be an alleged highlight of Invincible VS.

It is important to note that the game defaults to a control scheme centered on a Special button. Fighting game veterans will probably want to switch immediately to the confusingly named Motion Controls, as the standard control scheme incurs a damage penalty. I say that Motion Controls is an odd name because it does not involve any sort of motion like on the Wii, but simply the control scheme fighting games have used for years with fireball, reverse fireball, and dragon punch motions. Invincible VS has rollback netcode and crossplay, which should clue you in on how this game is aimed at the Fighting Game Community (FGC). My limited time playing online went smoothly, even as I had a less-than-stellar connection. Additionally, another cool feature is a Creator Mode, which removes blood and gore. Streaming is a very important part of keeping fighting games alive, and that would be hard to do if channels were terminated just from having footage of Dupli-Kate’s clones exploding in a blood mist.

Characters are another feature I’m torn about. Characters all technically have different movesets, but the emphasis on the Special button means each character is reliant on three special moves, which are essentially the same no matter the character. While there are exceptions with characters like Ella Mental, Bulletproof, and Anissa, part of the fun of fighting games is tinkering with different mechanics or abilities. Supers and Ultimates also fall under this category, and while Ultimates in particular are punctuated with nice visuals and a snarky line or two, these moves are fairly uniform. I admit that, as players discover and experiment, I could be wrong, and there is a certain amount of depth with the game’s mechanics and systems, such as a chargeable medium attack, and I understand why having characters who perform uniformly makes them fit much easier in a versus game. The danger here is that if most characters perform similarly, players will simply gravitate towards the best, potentially resulting in a very small viable roster. For instance, Omni-Man has a completely safe, invincible dragon punch – there is very little reason not to use this move, and there isn’t much your opponents will be able to do about it. Even on the casual side, players who are fans of the show are going to have expectations on what the characters can do. The character quips aren’t satisfying enough, and as a fan of Rexplode, I was bummed at seeing the lack of interesting design that can be seen in both modern fighting games and even other genres. Most of the Viltrumite cast are wooden and visually look the same. Casual players may still have great moments considering light attack’s autocombo feature, but with no real offline content, their only choice after a point is to venture online, where players will be merciless. On the flip side, Quarter Up has to give FGC players a reason to pick up Invincible VS, as the fighting game landscape is rich.

The tutorial is automatically based on the Standard control scheme, which can make learning Invincible VS jarring if you prefer traditional controls. This tutorial also does not go over certain very important aspects of combat, like rolling after being knocked down, or doing a quick recovery, provided you haven’t been hit by a hard knockdown. The neglect of motion players culminates in the fact that Boost Dash is not displayed in the moveset unless you go into the control menu. Speaking of menus, Invincible VS will have you dig through a lot of them. Invincible VS has no menu memory, so when I was training, I had to open up the menu and tab over a few times to actually see my character’s moves. Prefight dialogue is unskippable, which feels like an industry sin at this point. There are much smaller issues, but they all add up: one of Powerplex’s moves is in the wrong language in the menu, captions with typos, the captions themselves are formatted so they’re hard to see, arcade modes are locked with no description of how to unlock them, you are bombarded with unlocks after a match which you have to acknowledge one at a time (even online!).

Note: Invincible VS begins with a Photosensitive/Epilepsy warning