Could Catwoman beat Superman in a fight? Somehow, yes
First things first: this is a fighting game in which you can summon murder cars as a super move. If you’re playing as Batman, that is, and we’re guessing that a lot of you will be.
Bats chucks down a smoke bomb, electrocutes his opponent with two tasers (because one often isn’t enough) and then, to add injury to injury, summons the Batmobile to screech across the screen at top speed and flatten them. It’s like an Eidolon with wheels. It doesn’t matter where you are – on top of a building, in the centre of the Fortress of Solitude, floating in an orbital space station above the earth –
push down those shoulder buttons and the Batmobile magically screeches into view. Somehow.
Injustice is by NetherRealm Studios, the team behind Mortal Kombat, and it shows. This is gloriously overblown stuff. The Flash runs a quick circuit of the globe to build up momentum on an uppercut. Superman punches his opponents into space and then, crucially, back down to earth. Not so bad when you’re pummelling the robotic Cyborg or the immortal giant Solomon Grundy, but when you’re
subjecting Harley Quinn to extraterrestrial GBH it can feel like overkill.
And this game is overkill. Pure, unadulterated overkill. It plays, appropriately, like someone with a cocaine habit as serious as their comics obsession spat out four hundred of the best ideas they could muster in a single sitting and then crafted that into a game without sleeping once. Everyone is fighting everyone, all the time, in the most spectacular fashion available.
The fighting style has a lot in common with the recent Mortal Kombat reboot, even aside from the bone-crunching violence and nifty camera angles – various flavours of light, medium and heavy attack make up the bulk of a character’s moveset, coupled with a handful of specials and those aforementioned car-summoning gravity-punching super-moves. The supers are powered by a separate
Super meter, not unlike the EX meter from Street Fighter, which recharges as you pull off combos or get punched in the face. They give bad players a bit of an edge, as standard, and good players an excuse to showboat.
Taking control of the characters is fairly intuitive and, above all else, enjoyable – within a few minutes we were pulling off juggle combos and dodging enemy attacks without much of a problem. So that’s nice. If you’re into your frame counts and hitboxes, there’s the option to delve deeply into
the mechanics too, but there’s still plenty for the casual enthusiast of elaborate violence to get into.
With a tap of a button, you unleash each characters’ unique special ability which power up as they fight: in Batman’s case, it was a swarm of Batarangs that bother the enemy at range. There’s a wide variety of stuff on offer, here. Superman gets even more powerful for a few seconds, The Green Arrow shoots – yep – green arrows at folk, The Flash moves so fast that he slows down time for his opponent, and Harley Quinn pulls out a picture of the Joker and gives it a kiss. Not sure what effect that had, to be honest.
Hold off using them and they get better – Batman goes from one ineffectual Batarang to four, for example, and the Green Arrow’s projectiles cycle through a variety of funky effects. None of his trademark boxing-glove arrows, though, as far as we could see, which seems like a fairly major oversight. Maybe they’ll be put in as DLC.
Finally, for the full superhero standoff effect, players can initiate a Clash – after a brief series of close-ups and exchanging of words, both players secretly bid up to three sections of their Super-meter and, following a slowmotion smackdown, to the victor go the spoils. “Spoils” in this case being extra damage for an attacker or a health boost for a defender. While it might not necessarily be what you’d look for in a frantic fighting game like this one, it certainly fits the superhero theme.
Each arena – of which there are around fifteen, including the ruins of Superman’s hometown Metropolis, the orbital space station Watchtower and so on – has two or three distinct areas chiefly unlocked by kicking your opponent through adjoining walls and following along behind. The transition animations are not only high-damage combos but a return to that over-thetop violence; to go from the Metropolis streets to the roof of a nearby building, for example, you’ll knock your opponent though five painful stories of office blocks before they land.
Scattered around the arenas are a variety of dangerous objects that can be used to your advantage, and each type of character will interact with them in different ways. While Superman might pluck a flying car out of the sky and jam it bonnet-first into his opponent’s face – sporting! – Batman will blow up the same car with a bomb and let the falling wreckage do the talking. Elements vary from things you can drop on people to carelessly huge red buttons that trigger spaceship exhausts to honking great
lumps of crystal you can swing about to send the Green Arrow flying towards the back wall of the Fortress of Solitude like a baseball in eyeliner and a stupid hat.
The single-player campaign starts with an introduction that features pretty much every DC superhero you can imagine having one big fight that stretches from the surface of the earth all the way to space. When they appear onscreen, there seems to be a rule that either they or another character must mention them by name within three seconds so we know who they are, in case of confusion. The characters are voiced like their actors were reading their lines in separate rooms several years apart from one another.
But for all the janky acting and insistence on setting fights in big empty patches of sky, the cutscenes and the fights flow together very well, lending play a sort of breathless quality that you don’t commonly find in the genre as you’re shoved between fights without so much as a loading screen. Singleplayer puts you in charge of Batman, everyone’s favourite superhero-who’snot- really-a-superhero, and follows his quest to stop world devastation via the medium of punching.
The plot, then, in a nutshell – quiff-owner and walking wardrobe malfunction Superman is understandably upset after Lois Lane and his unborn son are killed in a nuclear explosion, so goes all-out mental and decides to form a new world order. As you do. Batman, ever the calm-headed diplomat, decides to form a resistance force against this injustice (geddit?) and can somehow stand
toe-to-toe with Supes and co in a fight for reasons that weren’t adequately explained. Maybe he handed around kryptonite sandwiches before everything kicked off?
Batman’s first fight is against Deathstroke – think Marvel’s merc-withthe- mouth Deadpool but with none of the charm and you’re pretty much there – and the second is against the freakish giant and chemically-altered Luchador Bane, before moving onto a scrap with Superman’s baldy nemesis Lex Luthor. After defeating Bane, Batman can swing the battle in his favour by throwing a bunch of batarangs at Luthor via an over-the-shoulder quick-time event; hitting all the buttons in order knocks down Luthor’s health bar a bit before the fight starts. It wasn’t clear how often QTEs would spring up in the game, but here’s hoping they’re rare.
Multiplayer is, of course, more fun than the single-player campaign because this is a fighting game and those are the rules. The characters split into two rough camps – big, strong types like Superman, Wonder Woman, Solomon Grundy, and Cyborg, and smaller, nippy folks like Nightwing, the
Flash, and Harley Quinn. Batman sits in the middle, brooding appropriately, which seems like a good place to be for the “main” character. Strong characters are slow by default – even Superman – which can take a little getting used to; while projectiles don’t feature heavily, the range of a character’s attacks can differ wildly depending on input so positioning and speed can be deceptively important.
The limited roster available to us seemed to rely on that split over anything else, and – isappointingly – characters often didn’t feel remarkably different to others in the same group. Combat’s fairly tight, but there’s something inescapably Mortal Kombat about that that suggests this is a game focused more on entertainment than mastery; there’s not the hair’s breadth precision you’d find in a Japanese
title, nor the breadth of fighting styles, and a lot of bombast. But sometimes accessibility is what you’re after. It’s not without moments of wideeyed joy, either. When playing as the psychotic Harley Quinn, there’s something to be said for mashing Superman’s face in with a giant hammer, knocking him underneath a falling spaceship and sending him crashing through the floor to an engine room eight floors below.
And that’s NetherRealm all over, that is. Injustice is a game built around a series of moments of grand, epicscale violence that are so brutal and so elaborate that the mach-5 slapstick of them makes you laugh out loud involuntarily. The sense of fun is inescapable, and the title already carries such massive flair that it’s hard not to be excited to see what the rest of it holds, even if it’s just bigger and better explosions. We love those.
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