Invincible Vs may pack a punch for fans of the show, but I wish it had more going on outside its tight versus mode

I've never read Invincible, but through playing the acclaimed comic's new licensed fighting game, I feel I've gotten to know its characters inside and out. I don't say that because I know any more about them than when I started, but because it's pretty easy in this game to punch people into showers of gore.

About a dozen seconds into the intro cinematic, Invincible Vs's titular teen hero is launched by his own father through a bypassing stranger's head, killing them instantly. My first point of feedback is that this guy seems extremely vincible.

It's good that he has friends then, since this is a 3v3 tag fighter like Marvel vs. Capcom or Dragonball FighterZ. And assists are truly where the game shines—each character has a relatively simple suite of moves split between light, medium, heavy attacks, specials, boosted variants of specials, and supers, but the fun really begins when you start using multiple kits in tandem.

You can swap in your buds during a fight for either one-and-done assist attacks or an active tag, which lets you switch to piloting them even while mid-combo. A combo limit meter prevents you from styling too hard all on your lonesome, but it resets when you tag, letting you go on for ridiculous stretches of punishment. It's immediately fun and freeform, and it feels great to let loose on a foe without having to spend hours identifying safe pressure options in the training room beforehand.

That may sound aggravating to be on the knuckle sandwich end of, and it can be, but you aren't trapped as soon as you get hit. If you hold down medium and heavy attack right as your opponent swaps characters mid-combo, you straight-up escape it. Of course, the enemy can feint an active tag for a fakeout, use a different combo, or delay the tag to make the timing trickier, so there's a degree of guesswork and mindgames going on even when one player is getting trampled. Fighting games thrive in these sorts of split-second 'I know that you know that I'm going to counter' flashpoints.

If you've played the Killer Instinct reboot, which some of Invincible Vs's developers worked on a decade ago, it's not exactly like the combo breaker system, but it pays off the same way: the game's strategic aspect doesn't screech to a halt when one player is winning hard.

If you're worried about cramp-inducing pretzel motions or double 360 stick inputs, don't be: Invincible has a one-button autocombo for inefficient but reliable bursts of damage (these lead into supers naturally and are suitable ways to set up active tags, but they fill up your combo meter fast), and specials are all bound to the same button press. I assume this game will attract fans of the show who have never picked up a fighter, and to its credit, it is certainly less intimidating than the likes of Tekken and Blazblue despite being 3v3.

Based on my initial impressions, Invincible Vs's biggest triumphs are as a tribute to the comic, the show, and the online fandom around them. One of the animated loading screen icons is a chibi Omni-Man doing his "think, Mark!" pose. As fights go on, characters bark insults at each other as their costumes get slashed to ribbons and drenched in blood. Any time Battle Beast opens his mouth, I reflexively go, "Hell yeah, Battle Beast" even though I barely know who he is. [Hell yeah, Battle Beast —Ed].

Its enthusiasm was just infectious enough that I wished it gave me more ways to play around in this world outside of the human-on-human versus mode.

There is a story mode, but it clocks in at around an hour and didn't impress me outside of its cutscenes—which were admittedly pretty sick. I still feel like I don't know much about the cast, but it's entertaining to watch superheroes yell obscenities and reduce each other to red mist. I have a feeling there's more to the comic than that, but this is a fighting game without much time to get nuanced, so it focuses on frenetic, gory action.

The premise of this mode is that a mysterious force is making various Invincible characters beat the snot out of each other, and that's exactly what happens, but many of these fights are pared down to 1v1 or 2v2 for narrative reasons. In other words, that assist system I mentioned—the lynchpin that makes all these simple kits shine by combining them—lacks a presence in the story mode, and the result is a parade of disposable battles that lack energy.

Once you've seen the cutscenes a single time, there's no reason to return to this mode, and while it captures the cadence of an action-packed superhero comic, I was disappointed that I rolled credits in about as long as it takes to read a trade paperback. (The comic, in its entirety, is way longer). I'd say it works as a tutorial, except it didn't even really teach me anything. On normal difficulty, the AI rolls over when met with autocombos and special spam, and everything I learned about tagging and assists came from separate, canned training missions.

Arcade mode doesn't fare much better. There's a handful of different difficulties, as well as unique endings for each character, but as a greenhorn to the series I felt like I was peering into a world of out-of-context spoilers. I'm one of those weirdos who plays fighting games specifically to check out the casual modes and singleplayer stories, and in that regard Invincible Vs feels like the old days, before Mortal Kombat introduced lengthy storylines and Street Fighter went Yakuza-lite.

I'm a bit disappointed, because that Killer Instinct reboot I mentioned from some of Invincible Vs's team had an innovative, roguelike-inspired solo mode called Shadow Lords. I was curious to see if a follow-up to that would show up in this game. It didn't, and nothing takes its place.

To be entirely fair, this game's emphasis on versus mode is not unusual for the genre, and it lines up with what executive producer Mike Willette told me when we chatted about the game last year: "We want you to become an online warrior. That's … where you're gonna see what fighting games have to offer."

But when I'm in the mood to grind a ranked ladder, I already have plenty of games to choose from, whether we're talking about fighting games or not. I enjoyed Invincible Vs's action plenty, but I had a hard time identifying the hook that'd keep me coming back aside from winks and nods meant for a fandom of which I'm not part.