By Buckles Supreme
Invincible VS is, at its core, a fighting game, made from the ground up by the developers at Quarter Up, a team made up of Killer Instinct (2013) veterans looking to make their newest slugger 13 years later. This effort is aimed at both veterans and casuals alike.
Invincible VS succeeds at making a tag fighting game that is played a lot differently than traditional fighters, but underlying that is a complex and interesting combo structure system that makes use of creative buttons rather than rigid combo trees.
The game has a completely solid foundation with the mechanics for tags, tag counters, armor counters, active tags, and more, which they go over in the tutorials. The game is a solid package that offers a lot to fighting game players looking to learn and play a good 3v3 tag fighter. The weaknesses of Invincible VS really only come from the price of admission and the amount of content that you are getting for that price tag.
Invincible VS is a full retail release, and because of that, what is presented here for the casual player and competitive player alike is really bare-bones for $50/£40.
The single-player Story Mode is only about an hour and a half at most, significantly shorter than most other fighting game story modes, which wouldn’t be so bad if the only other casual mode besides that wasn’t just Arcade Ladders.
The story mode also ends on a cliffhanger, making it so that the ending is unsatisfying and leaves the player with more questions than answers. I also can’t help but think that if this game never gets more post-launch support, this single-player mode is a big sore spot since the story isn’t even complete in its current form. The idea seems to be to expand the story as additional game seasons launch, but that’s assuming the community is there to support the game long term. If not, you have a really weak story that offers some gameplay, but not much else.
The graphics on display here, along with the in-game cutscenes, are a mix between the Invincible style and 3D models. While they don’t look bad by any means, I felt like there was just that opportunity they could have added something extra to the UI or art style to really call back to the series comic origins.
The team at Quarter Up has collaborated with The Glitch Mob to create the full Invincible VS OST. There is a really solid mix of electronic music here in the album’s selection, and I couldn’t help but think of similar hyping soundtracks from games like KI. It really helps make the game more fun and exciting when the soundtrack is ramping up with the action.
The online is good; we tested the rollback in an environment between a UK connection and US East and got less than 200 ping consistently, so we could play matches, although it was stressing it quite a bit. The lobbies have a bunch of features for letting up to four matches happen simultaneously and letting people watch in spectator, which is honestly all a lobby needs to do these days in order to allow the community a place to just chill and play.
The game has all the modes you would expect a core fighting game to have at launch in this day and age, but upon further inspection, the game is missing a bit of meat on the bones that it needs to justify its almost full retail price tag, and that puts it in an awkward place at launch.
Invincible VS has a solid foundation of a fighting game that has seen lots of apparent care and curation. However, the features presented with the price tag don’t justify how much it currently costs. Still, there’s a solid game that will see more expansion with consistent developer and community support (hopefully…).
7/10
Review code provided by the publisher. Thank you!
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