At the EB Games Expo today we were given a chance to play the upcoming Injustice: Gods Among Us video game from developer Netherrealm Studios and Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon. For those of you that have not yet heard of this title, it is essentially a fighting game that features a plethora of DC Comics characters that have to fight each other.
From what we saw of the game, it is pretty good graphically. This is not just from a texturing and details perspective, but also from an aesthetic one. What I really liked about the character aesthetics was that they were clearly identifiably that particular character at a glance, but when you pay closer attention, you can see that they’re a lot more functional and stylish to fit in better with the games mythos. The best example of this is with The Flash, where he normally be wearing this kind of red spandex material, he now wears this kind of armoured material. He is still, without a doubt, The Flash from a visual standpoint, but he’s The Flash of this games universe.
From what we could tell, there were two primary types of fighting characters in the game, Power characters and Gadget characters. The names of these types are pretty self explanatory. So, like, Superman would be a power character, whilst Nightwing would be a gadget character. This is pretty much for differences in fighting style, so Power characters are all about big powerful moves, whilst gadget characters use items and weapons to their advantage.
Fighting in this game is a reasonably fun affair. What makes the combat in this game entertaining is that, not only do you get to have DC heroes beat on each other on iconic levels, but there are also a tonne of variables in each battle. For instance, in a fight in the batcave, players are able to hit a button to get the batmobile to fire rockets at a target player. What’s even better is that there are multiple levels to some arenas, meaning that players can knock their opponents off the side and battle in a completely different area to the one that they were on. And on levels like the batcave, it’s fully possible to return back to the start of the level.
There are other cool things players can do, like if you’re a power character, you can lift cars into the air and hurl them at your enemies. If you’re a gadget character, you can use your character to dodge and bounce off that same vehicle whilst it’s still floating. It’s intracacies like this in the combat system that make it fun. There are also items that appear on the level after certain conditions are met, that really give a massive advantage to whichever player controls them.
From what we’ve played of Injustice: Gods Among Us we were incredibly pleased. It is looking like it will be an incredibly entertaining experience and we expect that everyone should check this out in the near future when it is released.
