As for the more niche crowd that’s into the nitty-gritty of these types of games, they’ll find a solid three-versus-three tag fighter deeply inspired by Marvel Vs. Capcom’s unhinged mayhem. Degeneracy isn’t just encouraged, it’s borderline required if you don’t want to get clobbered into meat chunks: Rapidly advancing special moves that chain into overhead assists, eight-way airdashes that lead to tricky mix-ups, and the ability to combo from basically every move make this into a high-power-level slug fest. It can be very empowering when everything’s going in your favor, and at its best, many of these characters have unique options that lead to novel playstyles. Atom Eve is a Storm-adjacent zoner with tricky aerial approaches thanks to her flight mode. Rex Splode propels himself through the skies with explosives, setting up bombardments that are as annoying as his in-universe counterpart. There may be a few too many flying Viltrumites in their fasc-y all-white attire, but at least each plays relatively differently.
In general, the flow of a match will be familiar to tag fighter players—you can freely change between your three characters mid-fight, there are snapbacks to forcibly switch out your opponents’ characters, etc.—but one of the biggest differentiators is how combos are fairly interactive. In most fighting games, especially modern ones focused on eight billion hit sequences, getting comboed means watching your opponent pummel you for probably too long with little to no interaction besides praying that your foe’s screws up. Invincible Vs differs in that combos are relatively short by default, but can be extended with something called Active Tag, where you call in another character to extend this string. However, every time you do this, the defender has a chance to respond, and if they time a Counter Tag properly, they’ll break out of the combo. It gets more complicated because the attacker can mix up the timing of their Active Tags or perform a Feint to bait out Counter Tag attempts. It’s a cool idea that works when both players are locked in, setting up mind games and tricky sequences, like when an opponent suddenly Active Tags from a random stray projectile.
At the same time, Active Tagging also gets at Invincible Vs’ core identity crisis. While Quarter Up wants this to be a beginner-friendly game aimed at new players, its core systems and priorities are clearly geared toward the more hardcore. Since you can combo from nearly everything and Active Tag any move, you can easily chain together devastating sequences if your foe doesn’t understand how to break out of them, leading to touch of death sequences that are probably to blame for many of the rage quits seen online. There are concessions for new players, like simplified inputs that avoid the “complexity” of quarter-circle forward motions, and you can mash light attack to get an automatic combo with every character, but the reality is that these streamlined qualities also make it easier for experienced players to apply their fundamental skills and thrash newbies. Simplified inputs don’t mean much without a deeper understanding of strategy, and the bare-bones tutorialization here doesn’t help. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game gave newcomers things to do outside of online play, but it doesn’t. Those interested in learning the genre and able to deal with early setbacks will definitely find this more approachable than something like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, but they’re still going to get demolished for a bit until they learn from wikis and YouTube tutorials.
While none of these issues matter much for those who’ve already taken their lumps, the game doesn’t fully work as a dedicated competitive experience at the moment either, because for every three or four cool ideas, there’s at least one bad one. Some characters have incredibly difficult-to-deal-with moves, like the zoner Ella Mental, who can set up persistent floating rock hazards that don’t go away even if their opponent is hammering away at their guard. Armored moves feel very overtuned, and many rapidly approaching special moves are safe on block, leading to riskless pressure. A lot of these attacks are hard to read due to the game’s wonky animation work, with these lackluster visuals robbing these strikes of any impact.
Then there’s the game’s single worst feature: the sudden-death system. If the timer runs out, you go into a final brawl where both players are reduced to a single character with a depleting health bar. What makes this so bad is that if one player has three characters left (because they are beating their opponent) and the other has one, the person who was winning loses most of their advantage. This is made worse by how often Sudden Death can trigger between skilled opponents who are using movement options and Counter Tags well (or when one player is hiding behind Ella Mental’s stone hazard). It’s easy to imagine many of these competitive issues being fixed—the studio behind the game has already promised day one adjustments from the recent Beta—but judged as is, there’s a good bit of work before this feels like a game top-level players will take seriously. Let’s hope it gets there, because it doesn’t have much going for it otherwise.
Invincible Vs. was developed by Quarter Up and published by Skybound Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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