Invincible VS

First things first, I am a fighting game player. I play these games A LOT. I love tag games, I love 3D fighters, I love plat fighters. All fighting games are good. Except this one. In the current state of the game this game is barely worth 30$ let alone the 50 asking price. The story mode while good is barely an hour and a half long, and single player content overall is lacking. The DLC costume prices got knocked down, but this is a 50 dollar game. The graphics look great, the voice acting is phenomenal, the maps are plentiful. Progression is good since you level up and unlock titles, player cards, and new character colors. Characters are surprisingly unique for such a basic control scheme, and the systems around combos is honestly worth half the price in of itself, as expected of former Killer Instinct devs. Netcode is to be desired but no fighting game has perfect netcode, it's good enough. Great couch game, fun to play with friends. Now the real review begins, and keep in mind I did pre order the base edition of the game because I was excited for this game. TL;DR Save your money, buy Dragon Ball FighterZ or UMVC3 on sale. Avoid this game as it is. This game will just make you sad as a competitive experience with pure kusoge nonsense that's not even funny. The game is new and can grow, so come back to this review in a few months to see if anything has changed. As the game is, I cannot recommend it at full price or on sale for more than 40$. I will wait for more balance updates to see where the game goes because I really want to like it, but it's not there yet. -Game was not designed with motion inputs in mind at all. It's a terribly slapped together after thought to say "Hey, we put them in!" It awful. Motion input special moves are negative edge (meaning they are on button RELEASE) so you have significantly less precision than in standard, and moves like snapback or heroic strike (the guard cancel) are on some of the most arbitrary inputs you ever seen. Snapback is on H+A2 specifically, so if you don't bind the input to a macro you're liable to calling an assist AND doing snapback at the same time, wasting your assist if the snapback actually hits. Counter Tag, the most integral mechanic to the game is on M+H for standard, but is on M+A1 for motion inputs?? Throw is on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ L+DASH for christ sake!!! This isn't a problem if you just play standard (how the game is clearly intended to be played), but the motion inputs are in the game just to check a box rather than any meaningful way to integrate them into game. Even the tutorials when the game launched (this has been fixed) did not show you the correct inputs when using motion. I would feel significantly less offended if they just were not included in the package at all if they're this thoughtlessly tagged on by devs that "heard us out". -The balance is all over the place and the game feels barely play tested at best. The LMH gatling series is not gapless for any of the cast which means you can just call assists out of blockstun with very few repercussions, normals are quite slow so you have to resort to using the guard cancel to punish certain specials which would be fine if it wasn't so many special moves AND some supers. Some moves are very punishable but end up spaced out so your mediums don't reach in time and you get put in a really unsatisfying spacing trap that you had very little options out of. And the assists. Some of the assists in this game are so powerful they are in contention for some of the best in any tag fighter, which is fine...if calling assists in this game wasn't so risk free and the reward for landing the assists wasn't so huge (Eve is a massive offender). There's so much armor in this game as well, and it's slapped around onto a load of moves without reason. Counterplay to armor is using your own armored moves or boosted moves, but it can feel inconsistent. Even still it feels like some characters (mainly the Viltrumites + Ella Mental) where play tested significantly more than other characters (Cecil, Powerplex, Rex) though this is a far more personal feeling than an objective one. -An extension of this is a problem with assists. Defense in this game is very powerful with things like guard cancels, defensive assists, armored moves, and pushblock but an attacker does have a single option to crack open the guard. Assists have 3 variants. You have neutral assists (not holding a direction), back assists (holding away from the opponent), and combo assists. What is a combo assist? A combo assists replaces your neutral assist with a unique assist that will only occur while the opponent is in hitstun OR blockstop. This usually acts as another hit to link moves that wouldn't normally combo or to extend your pressure, as well as extending the combos since assists decrease combo meter. But there is another property. Barring Dupli-Kate, Thula, Ella Mental, Powerplex, and Lucan, every character in the game has an overhead assist. Why is that a problem? Every character, EVERY CHARACTER, has access to some sort of low normal, which means practically every time the opponent blocks they have to guess high-low or low-high in an instant, and if you guess wrong you get launched. While technically not unblockable, a lot of these overheads are borderline unreactable so getting hit by them is more or less just a straight up guess that you MUST guard cancel without many other options to defend it. No game should have easy bake 1 button unblockables. Even games with hard to see mixups usually ask to be put in a specific scenario Millia in GGST requires specific knockdowns for her strongest mixups that she does not always have access to and Cyrax in MK needs meter to prevent the opponent from combo breaking if they guess incorrectly and demands high maitnence and execution to get the most out of their mixups. Even in other tag fighters you will struggle to find even one overhead/low assist among the entire casts because that is one of the most powerful properties you could have on a mixup oriented assist. Regardless of how the devs would like to lean in terms of modern vs motion inputs or how they want to balance the game, overhead assists need to be removed from the game moving forward bare minimum. If you aren't mashing your heart out on defense, you're getting hard-to-blockable'd and no matter what it just doesn't feel good. I want to like this game. I REALLY want to like this game. Every time I play this game however I'm simply reminded of (usually) cheaper, better games that control better and have much more satisfying things to learn/do. Everything you can find in Invincible VS, I can find in Dragonball FighterZ, Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3, and 2XKO. That is horrible thing for a fighting game. There is a lot of ground work in this game that needs to be torn up and disposed of (motion inputs would be a great start IMO) so it can be replaced by something actually fun and competent. It's not like this game doesn't have legs to stand on! Active Tag besides being plus on block is a great mechanic, especially since in combos it creates a rock paper scissors with counter tag and active tag feints. Unfortunately the FGC is very good at finding as few interactions as possible to win, so once you start watching or start playing in higher levels, active tag for combo extensions is more rare (not a useless mechanic though) since you can just take the guaranteed combo damage from a solo character's combo and run pressure like that. The combo meter doesn't feel as intrusive as a game like GBVSR and it practically the only thing holding back your imagination in combos since there's no hitstun decay (or if there is, it's very minimal). Resource management is quite fun between health, assists, Boost meter, and super meter. I play SF6 and dabble with Under Night, so making that fun for me is important, but it's not as important same extent as Drive or GRD.