Invincible VS Proved Me Wrong: A Fighting Game With Real Identity

Low expectations going in. The game spent every round proving me wrong. That is the short version of my week with Invincible VS, the tag fighter built around Robert Kirkman's comic and the Prime Video show it grew into.

The launch trailer had me bracing for the worst. My read going in was that this would be a thinner Dragon Ball FighterZ, a game that leans on a beloved property and hopes the fan-service carries it. FighterZ is a blast, but a lot of it is busy replaying the anime at you instead of being its own thing. I expected Invincible VS to run the same playbook: cameos, catchphrases, not much underneath. I was wrong, and I am happy to say it out loud.

What surprised me is how little it needs the show to prop it up. The references are there, but they never do the heavy lifting. Strip the Invincible branding off and you still have a fighting game with its own ideas about spacing, tagging, and how a round should feel. That is rare for a licensed fighter, and it is the whole reason I keep loading it back up while I wait for season 5 of the show. I have already read every issue of the comic, so I know where the story goes. I still want to watch the adaptation get there, and I would love it if the show's success bought this game a longer life.

The roster is where that hope lives. The launch lineup covers the obvious pillars and it is solid, but you can feel the gaps. Conquest made the cut, and every time his promo art comes up I think the same thing. This man looks like he is waiting for more friends to show up.

Which brings me to the crossover I did not know I wanted until the developers floated it. They have already said on record that they would be up for a Mortal Kombat collaboration, and the groundwork is basically done. Omni-Man already stomped his way into Mortal Kombat 1 as a guest, mustache and murder speech intact, so the two worlds have shaken hands once already. Put him in a tag team across from Scorpion and I will stop typing to go pre-order whatever that is. Shut up and take my money.

A low power versus that hides its depth

The first hour is a trap, in the best way. Combos look short. Neutral looks basic. You mash, you win a few, and you assume you have seen the ceiling. Then someone shows you a route you did not think the engine allowed, and the whole thing cracks open. People are still digging up pieces of it weeks after launch, and what looked like a shallow puddle turned out to have a lot of floor missing under it.

The best label I have for it is a low power versus fighter. In the older Marvel vs. Capcom games, meter is terrifying. Characters get supers that eat the whole screen, beams that cover you from anywhere, ways to erase a bad decision with one button. Invincible VS mostly says no. Very few characters have a full-screen beam. The normals are decent, not monstrous. So the game turns into a contest of movement and neutral, where you earn your way in instead of pressing the button that deletes the other player's options.

That balance leans toward defense, and this is the part that will split people. Opening someone up is hard. Nearly everyone has an unblockable somewhere, but landing it is a puzzle of conditions. Did they have a breaker. Could they push block. Could they snap out. Were they airborne, was it even the right moment. Offense, at least in this patch, feels like the weaker side of the coin. You grind for every opening and you do not always get paid for it.

The assists tell the same story. Atom Eve and Cecil are the names everyone builds around, and the reason matters: they do not crack people open for free, they work as safety nets. There are almost no beam assists in the game, so nobody clips you from full screen and strolls in behind it. The result is a lot of air. Players jump, double jump, and float, partly because the ground game is such a slog. There is no traditional chicken blocking either, so you cannot just leap and hold back. You eat the hit for trying, which I respect more than I expected to.

And then there is the armor. Armor in this game is absurd. Armor on block, armor into tag, moves that shrug off your cleanest read and keep coming while you swallow the counterhit. It took me a while to stop swearing at it and start abusing it myself. The first time I bulldozed straight through a pressure string that should have blown up in my face, standing my ground while an entire combo just bounced off me, I felt like I was...

Damage plays out the same way. The lab monsters have found touch-of-death combos, the kind of thing that looks lethal in a clip. In real matches they almost never land. A clean hit does not promise a kill, because boost, breaker, and positioning all have to line up first. The one time it does get lopsided is when your team is fresh and you have knocked two characters off the other side. No assist breaker left for them, and it becomes combo video time. It is a little unfair. It is also the most satisfying insurance policy in the game.

My gripes live at the top of the ladder. Push past eight or nine thousand points and the game gets patient to a fault. Lots of waiting. Not much reason to commit. It starts to look like high-level Dragon Ball FighterZ, all dashing in, calling an assist, and dashing back out. It does not help that most characters seem to move backward faster than they move forward, so chasing a runaway opponent means burning boost just to keep pace. And raw tag is too easy. Swapping characters in the middle of a block string, from almost anywhere, feels like a loose thread the developers will eventually have to pull.

For all of that, it plays like the versus games I grew up on. Not Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but the older, stranger MvC 1 and 2, where half the game was sitting on down-back and mashing an assist until you caught something. Call it American Dragon Ball Fighters if you like, minus the super dash that hands you the hit. The single-player side holds up too. The story mode is short, but it is dense and it looks great, with none of the filler stretches where characters stand around talking at each other for three hours. Every fighter carries a little mini battle pass with things to unlock, a nicer hook than I walked in expecting.

The foundation is worth the argument

None of these complaints are fatal. They are the sound of a community figuring out a game that is clearly worth figuring out. Offense could use more incentive. The boost gauge could do more to reward pressure than retreat, and I would take a handful of those changes tomorrow. Still, the core is fun, and it is holding my attention in a genre that usually loses me by week two. I came in expecting a cash-in and found a game with a point of view. If season 5 pulls in a fresh wave of players and the updates keep landing, Invincible VS could outlive everything my trailer-era self assumed about it.