Here it is, the first major fighting game of the year. This review is a little late to the party, but I decided this was the right moment to sit down with it properly before moving on to the next fighter on the horizon, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game. Consider it warm-up time.
Full disclosure upfront: I am not, and have never been, a fan of the Invincible franchise. My knowledge of the plot, the power system, and the characters is surface-level at best. I recognize the faces and a few of the names, but the deeper lore of this universe is largely unfamiliar territory for me. That perspective shapes this review, for better or worse.
Brutality Thrown in Fistfuls
Skybound Games took a swing at building a big-budget fighter around this IP, and honestly, that decision makes a certain kind of sense. Omni-Man’s appearance in Mortal Kombat 1 proved there was real appetite for Invincible characters in the fighting game space, and the studio appears to have taken that audience enthusiasm as a green light to build something of their own.
I do have some history with the genre. I’ve put time into Tekken, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, and a handful of others. I know how these systems work, how they’re constructed, and I can still recall combo strings from Mortal Kombat 9 that have no business living rent-free in my memory. So when I say that Invincible VS gave me an immediate and familiar sense of burnout, I’m coming from a place of having put real time into the genre rather than bouncing off something unfamiliar.
The feeling reminded me of what I experienced with Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact. There’s a cheapness to it, particularly in online matches, where character balance issues become impossible to ignore. Damage output and impact frames feel inconsistent in ways that start to erode confidence in the competitive side of the game fairly quickly.
The Gameplay: A 3v3 With Real Depth
This is the most important category for any fighting game, and it’s where Invincible VS has the most interesting things to say. It doesn’t operate like a traditional one-on-one fighter in the vein of Mortal Kombat or Tekken. Instead it’s a 3v3 tag team format where building a team and managing your roster mid-fight is as important as individual execution. Matches run longer as a result, which gives the moment-to-moment combat more room to breathe.
I was genuinely surprised by the combo complexity and the quality of the special move inputs. Going in with low expectations on that front, I anticipated something shallow and poorly tuned, closer to a budget arena brawler than a proper fighting game. What I found was more nuanced than that. The depth is real, even if the balance issues undercut it online. The character roster covers who you’d expect: the main cast and anyone who carries narrative weight in the series. Testing movesets across most of the available fighters, the animations in particular stand out as strong work. Each character has a physicality that feels considered rather than copy-pasted.
Art Style That Outpaces the Source
The visual presentation is one of the genuine highlights here. The art style is, in several places, sharper and more expressive than what you get in the Amazon Prime series, though it sits a step below the comic book source material at its best. That’s the opinion of someone arriving relatively fresh to this universe, so take it for what it’s worth.
Stage design also impressed. The arenas borrow the multi-tier mechanic seen in Injustice and Tekken, letting you crash opponents through floors and walls into entirely new sections of the environment. It adds spectacle to fights and gives each stage a sense of vertical scale that a flat platform wouldn’t achieve.
Sound Design That Lands Every Hit
There isn’t much to criticize in the audio department. The sound design does exactly what you want from a fighting game: every broken rib, every face punch, every crashing impact carries enough weight to pull you into the action and make each hit feel like it matters. That feedback loop between what you see and what you hear is one of the things that makes or breaks a fighter, and Invincible VS gets it right.
The soundtrack is less remarkable. It’s functional and keeps the energy up during long sessions, but it’s not the kind of music you’d pull up outside of the game. It does its job and nothing more, which in the context of everything else going on is perfectly acceptable.
A Multiverse Story That Stays Surface-Level
As someone without deep roots in the Invincible lore, I’ll keep this section honest about its limitations. The story mode is built around a multiverse premise, specifically an alternate reality where Mark Grayson (Invincible) faces off against Viltrumites from other timelines alongside familiar faces from the main continuity. It’s the kind of framing that gives the game license to put any combination of characters on screen without worrying too much about canon.
The execution is where it falls short. The story mode clocked in at around two hours, and the vast majority of it felt like connective tissue between fights rather than actual narrative. Cutscenes introduce a conflict, a fight happens, another brief setup leads to another fight. There isn’t enough space between those moments for anything to breathe or develop. For someone already emotionally invested in these characters it might land differently, but coming in neutral, it didn’t leave much of an impression.
Decent, But Still on the Bench
Invincible VS is not a bad game. That’s an important thing to say clearly. But at its current price point, the content on offer feels thin for what you’re being asked to spend. It doesn’t carry the staying power of a game you’d return to for years, and the online balance issues are significant enough to dampen the competitive experience for anyone who takes that side of the game seriously.
What it does well is serve the fanbase it was built for. If you love the Invincible universe and want to play as these characters against your friends on the couch, this game delivers that experience in a way that’s clearly made with care. The combat has real depth underneath the balance rough edges, and the presentation is genuinely good across art direction and audio.
For everyone else, patience is the move. Wait for a sale, wait for patches to address the balance problems, and then revisit. The bones of a fun fighter are here. It just needs more time and polish to live up to what the IP deserved.
Final Score: 6.8 / 10
I’m passionate about books and video games. These two great passions represent, for me, a boundless universe where I can “escape” from reality whenever I need or want to. There are so many stories, worlds, and landscapes where I can instantly teleport that I don’t think a whole lifetime would be enough to explore them all (though it would be my greatest dream to be able to).
