Accidentally bought me the first Injustice in a bundle while i was trying to buy only the sequel because i'm technologically illiterate, and for the next few paragraphs i'm gonna make it your problem. Actually the second time i purchased Injustice 1, i had it on the 360 ages ago but i pretty much remember nothing from it, so it might as well be my first time regardless.
Gameplay-wise, Injustice has a few interesting ideas, a lot of them land, but not all.
All arenas have interactable objects and most of them have 2 different sections you can transition off and on to, both things that i can appreciate a lot as a shameless party game filthy casual. Characters will even interact differently with certain objects according to their size and moveset, which is a tiny detail in the grand scheme of things, but i think it's cool as ♥♥♥♥.
Each character has some sort of gimmick they can activate for a short time if they press B. A lot of them inevitably do look similar from each others, like armors and extra damage, but overall it's a nice added feature to make each supe stand out both in gameplay and flavour.
Clashes are a thing too, pretty much just a QTE in which you decide how much of your meter to burn against your opponent, and if you win you earn some extra life. Nothing particularly interactive, but i do like how sometimes you get to hear character-specific dialogues as it happens.
The biggest issue i have with Injustice's mechanics is the single life bar. Makes it a lot harder to come back from a difficult situation in my opinion compared to the traditional round system. You do get a brief cooldown period when half life bar is drained, but that's it.
Oh, and just a warning if you think your combos aren't connecting properly: you might want to turn off the "release check" option. Made things a lot easier for me, but i suppose mileage may vary from player to player.
Like all other NRS games, Injustice features a cinematic Story mode to keep you busy for 4-5 hours, in case you wanted an easy way to grind rewards. The gameplay almost entirely consists of CPU fights with no extra stipulation or win condition in place, as it's always been the case, making it rather unremarkable to play with, especially compared to when we'll see in the S.T.A.R. Labs, and the monotony of these fights is only broken up by the most basic minigames you'll ever see.
Regarding the story itself: going in i was expecting to take issue with NRS's clunky chapter system like it's been the case with all their other games, but surprisingly i thought the pacing was laid out well enough to make each chapter feel natural within the context of the narrative. In spite of that, this is also by far the worst NRS story i've ever played. Just a miserable hodgepodge of bad dialogue, nonsensical plot points and wasted potential.
I remember owning some of the Injustice comics back in the day, was trying to get my dad to read them too. I don't know why out of my collection i was so dead-set on introducing him specifically to those ones, since they weren't exactly anything to write home about. The autistic brain.
Anyway, the S.T.A.R. Labs more than make up for the shoddiness of the Story mode. It consists in a massive amount of character-specific missions, 300 in total, which have all been given some context through dialogues and illustrations. Now yes, a lot of them are combo trials or basic QTE minigames, but i'd say the overall package is really impressive, not just because of the variety in missions, but also because of all the story reasons they've come up with to justify all the ♥♥♥♥ you have to do. Communist JLA had me more hooked with their one-line dialogue exchanges than the whole cinematic story LMFAO. Again, to be fair, not every mission will be a slam dunk, not every storyline will be memorable, but the sheer quantity of them all prevents me from being too critical.
Having to pause the game to see the secondary objectives of each mission as you're playing it is my biggest issue here, really.
And lastly, we got the Battles, a healthy number of different arcade ladders, each with their own set of rules. Some of them are beyond brutal LMFAO, to the point that it makes me wonder how many people actually beat them. Leaderboards are hacked from top to bottom, so that's not gonna help. I wish you could see the arcade endings when you play ladders outside of the Classic one, it would help a lot with variety in case you wanted to see them through the game.
Injustice has its own interpretation of the Mortal Kombat's Krypt in the form of the Archive, and while its presentation doesn't have a ton of personality, all the content you'd expect from something like that is here: concept arts, alternative costumes, bios, extra challenges, gamertag skins, the usual. I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love unlockable concept arts, and while there's tons to unlock in here i wish they credited the artists who drew them, maybe with some commentary, similarly to the 3D MKs.
Music is also unlockable, but it's kinda worthless as is because: A. you can't assign individual tracks to specific characters/arenas B. i have never heard a more generic soundtrack in my whole life.
Online is completely dead unfortunately. No one in the lobbies, no one in ranked, nor in casual. It's a shame because there seems to be a few more gimmicky modes to play with than what you'd usually see in modern-ish fighting games and i was curious to try them out.
I'd say the game is still very much worth purchasing just for the wealth of single player content, i bought it in a bundle with the sequel for like 3 bucks and even at full price it's not that expensive. It's got Lobo.
