There are a number of things you can do in Injustice 2 that would probably never happen in any straight-laced movie or TV show about DC Comics characters, and it has nothing to do with superheroes punching each other. You can make Superman wear an orange costume. You can make Blue Beetle green. You can give Deadshot a solid-gold mask that looks like a football helmet. You can make Batman look like he’s cosplaying as a robot from an ’80s anime, color the whole thing like Boba Fett, and then send him off to trade quips with Atrocitus, a Green Lantern villain who could probably count the number of interactions he’s had with Batman in the comics on one claw.
These ridiculous twists on traditional aesthetics are all because of Injustice 2’s brilliant loot system, but the reason it’s brilliant isn’t because it lets you make superheroes look crazy. It’s brilliant because it’s a nod to the wackiness of DC’s multiverse on a scale that fans probably haven’t seen before outside of something like the universe-hopping opening of Crisis On Infinite Earths. As comic book fans know, alternate universes always come with weird variations on the typical superhero designs to show the reader that the universe is somehow different from the one they’re used to, like giving Superman a blue cape or whatever. Injustice 2 explicitly takes place in an alternate universe—specifically one where Superman became a fascist dictator—and so the game cleverly makes the creation of wacky multiversal costume variants into a core component.
Basically, completing fights—either online or off—gets you space bucks that you can use to buy boxes filled with loot. Cheaper boxes will give you cheaper gear and better boxes will give you better gear, with the better gear typically looking crazier and adding additional buffs or abilities to your characters. (There are also rare shaders that let you change the color of an outfit, but that’s more about trying to dazzle your opponent with your fabulous style than anything else.) Every piece of gear has stats, so outside of specific modes that nullify any bonuses, that means you’ll want to have good loot before trying to take on harder fights. If you’re playing as a stock Harley Quinn, you don’t want to run into someone online whose Harley Quinn has a cool hat, because that means she probably has higher health or does more damage than you—not to mention the fact that she’ll look cooler than you, which is a victory all on its own.
The best way to get a jump start on unlocking good loot is by playing through the story mode, which—like the first Injustice—is much better than you’d expect out of a fighting game. Injustice 2 takes place a short time after the original, which saw Batman forming a team of resistance fighters to take down the fascist Superman, with the Man Of Steel and his compatriots (including Wonder Woman, Batman’s son Damian, and Cyborg) now either in prison or on the run. Everything gets shaken up when Supergirl arrives, as she’s closely followed by longtime DC villain Brainiac, a super-intelligent robot/alien who had a hand in the destruction of Krypton. Naturally, Batman ends up having to team up with Superman to stop Brainiac, and a big roster of DC heroes form an uneasy alliance in an attempt to keep the invader from destroying the Earth. The writing is solid (especially some of the pre-fight quips), but it’s also worth noting that the facial animation is so detailed and expressive that it’s legitimately unsettling at first.