Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition (EU) Reviews

  • Harris59Harris591,195,928
    08 Feb 2015 08 Feb 2015
    10 0 1
    As a non-fighting game enthusiast, and one who typically struggles to match the unholy combo power of the fighting game community I went into this game with an expectation to be smashed to pieces and have a sour experience which would be solely due to my "lack of skill" within the genre... However, this was not the case at all.

    The game is a decent gateway into the fighting genre, mostly because it teaches the importance of frames and button timing by force, something other fighters usually forget they need to push onto you, the game is quite strict on button timing and because of this you are forced to realise a truth which blew my mind: Fighting games are much slower paced games! That's right, it's all about key button presses during the appropriate frames, there's no frantically putting button inputs in every half-second trying to smash a huge combo, very few fighting games work that way and those that do incorporate that style are usually limiting it to particular "fast" characters.

    Upon learning that important thing and really looking where I can string combos, and what kind of recovery frames characters have to enable me to sneak in follow-up attacks that will flow into a combo I began to have more success both online and offline. Sometimes games need to give you no other option than to LEARN THE GAME to really force you to realise how to play, otherwise I'd have just been doing the same kind of basic fighting strategy I took into the Soul Calibur series of doing one special move or small combo from the moves list, wait for them to get up, do another kind of move, rinse, repeat.

    This experience has in turn made me enjoy the fighting game genre a whole lot more because I now know how I'm supposed to play and I thank this games anti-noob playing style for allowing me to step up my game, now yes, SOME characters can still be "spammed", but spamming is far less rewarded than other fighting games and if you wanna mash the same button or special move over and over you will lose 9 times out of 10, even against the Very Easy AI you can lose, especially since mis-timing a move slightly will DROP the move entirely leaving you completely open, and for fans of playing fighting games online you'll LOVE this!

    The gameplay also offers a bunch of fun gimmicks alongside this well constructed and balanced fighting system, interactions and level transitions, the first of which will be scattered around the battlefield, you'll be prompted to press R1 to use them and depending what character you have you'll use them different. Example: Use Doomsday near a turret and he'll throw it at the enemy, do the same using Batman and he'll activate it and shoot you with it. The second of these cool gimmicks is level transitions, you can knock your player off the battlefield and into a new space through a high damaging and exciting transitional animation which looks sweet no matter how many times you've done the same transition! Alongside this in regards to nice damaging animations you can sit and watch, each character has a Super move that can be used at full meter which look nice.

    Now that I have the core combat out of the way, it's time I talk about what the games content actually contains, because while the gameplay is the most important thing in a fighting game, the amount of content it offers both online and offline is still somewhat important (even if you decide not to touch most of it)

    Single Player

    Story - Lets get this out of the way as quick as possible because no one plays fighting games for the story... HOWEVER, this game does a good job of having a fun story mode which not only is somewhat decent to follow along with but gives you a good introduction to the gameplay with multiple playable characters through the single long story campaign (no one story per character)

    Battle Mode - Just like the "Arcade" style modes in most fighting games this will pit you against "x" amount of enemies and give you a character related ending, but where this excels is offering more than just one arcade battle, in fact what we all know of as "Arcade" mode is Battle #1 (Classic), which is one of 20, Classic is also the only one where you can select a difficulty, all the others are set and will increase as you go down and offer a variety of challenges such as: Requiring you to win each match while geting "x" amount of hits in a combo, Beating the whole battle in 2 minutes total, Winning 10 fights in a row on the hardest difficulty setting, Fighting the entire cast of the game on one health bar etc. This diversity (as well as challenge in some parts) adds a real incentive to play them all out, and fighting the entire games cast on one life bar can really push you to improve, it's so satisfying.

    STAR Labs - This mode is jam packed with mini-games and challenges which are shorter than playing a long battle but there's a lot more of them, all requiring extra bonus objectives to be completed in order to unlock extra starts of which there are 720 to collect. These missons can vary from meeting particular goals in a fight like hitting 40% damage in a single combo, doing a set of moves in a particular order etc. to having a fun minigame like pong against Cyborg xD, whilst the minigames do repeat a few times they increase in difficulty each time you encounter them. Most these minigames are pretty fun and others are just a simple copy of something else (such as the obvious pong missons) but all of them are a blast to try out and if you don't have much time it's great to just play a couple of those.

    Multiplayer

    Versus - Just like any game these days, multiplayer exists online, but being a fighting game it still has the traditional offline Versus mode, unfortunately the amount of options in Versus are quite limited compared to other fighting games on the market, there aren't even any handicap options etc. from what I can see. My biggest disappointment with the multiplayer however is while in the single player Battle and STAR Labs modes you often see matches with 2 or more enemies which switch out once one is defeated, like a tag team, but this element is never put into a multiplayer option :( Additionally being based in the DC universe teaming up heroes and villains seems an integral part of the plot of the game yet there isn't even a team version of Versus which to my memory has existed since Soul Blade on the PS1 and would add so much more life to local multiplayer which has been dwindling away every since the popularity of online multiplayer.

    Online (Ranked) - The online multiplayer is somewhat decent and has an acceptable netcode but as is common a lot of fighting game, unfortunately, matchmaking is as slow as ever, playing a full match takes far less time than finding a match and connecting to the opponent which can really suck you away from the experience, after all, sitting around waiting for more minutes than you're playing is bound to be disappointing. Also a key note, multiplayer is REGION LOCKED, and whilst it is understandable that they want to limit play across regions due to connection difficulties being so destructive to the fighting game experience it also means you may need to wait longer and cannot even play private unranked games with a friend unless they're in your region.

    Online (Non Ranked) - Non-ranked multiplayer has a few varieties which can make it more pleasure-able to play such as King of the Hill and Survivor, which are very similar to each other but offer a totally different experience. King of the Hill is exactly what you would expect, winner... stays... on! But what makes this pretty cool is first and foremost the lobby system, one of which I haven't seen personally in a fighting game but am aware quite a few now implement. You have a chat window, a game window and such and can seamlessly flick between full screen spectating to having the game window smaller. You also have a betting feature in the game for spectators to keep people engaged until it's their turn to face the current king, you can not only bet on who wins but if they meet their set goal (such as not taking damaging for "x" amount of time). Survivor on the other hand is the same formula, except this time the winner who stays on will keep any damage he took from the previous fight, and will need to not only fight more defensively but will need to perform specific feats in game to recover health at the end of the match.

    Online (Practice) - A nice addition to the game is being able to practice online with a friend, invite them to the match and you can see each others inputs, help each other learn combos, try out techniques on each other to see if they counter another technique etc. Or... mindlessly beat each other up knowing you both have infinite life and see who can juggle each other the longest XD

    Overall I find that this game offers a nice chunk of content and like I said before it really forces you (in a good way) to learn how to play fighting games, which in turn will actually make you a lot better at the genre, I find myself playing other fighting games such a Soul Calibur, Tekken, Street Fighter and Killer Instinct (Older one) far better than I used to thanks to this games teaching. I would highly recommend it, especially for those who struggle with the genre, it has a somewhat steep learning curve but it works and is worth it!
    4.0
    Showing only comment.
    Paully005Awesome review, great work!
    Posted by Paully005 on 29 Jul 16 at 17:15
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