Disclaimer
The copies of the game used for this review were provided by the publisher at no cost to the reviewer.
Introduction
Fighting games are a genre I dip in and out of on occasion, especially when accessible ones like Mortal Kombat 1 (which I reviewed around the time of its release) appear, though sadly such examples are few and far between. I often enjoy battling friends more than playing online, as at least then you can have a laugh and be amazed together at things that are happening on screen, with the added clarity that comes from talking to a person you know. This stands in stark contrast to being in conflict with a person who will use whatever cheap and cheesy methods they know to win at the detriment of others, at least in my experience.
One example I very much still enjoy is Killer Instinct 2013, though that game’s own accessibility is sadly and frustratingly lacking compared to today’s titles in terms of one particular aspect,that being menu narration; the last surviving component where accessibility would be needed to make it a complete package and allow anyone to pick the game up and learn it without assistance, at least in theory.
Why do I mention KI though? After all, that is a 13-year-old game as of the end of 2026. That’s because the dev team, or at least core members of it, are back with a new entry in the 3v3 tag genre, amping up the violence and blood to levels only really found in games like the Mortal Kombat series, in terms of fighters specifically.
This studio, known as Quarter Up’s debut offering is actually the subject of this review, going by the name Invincible VS (pronounced as Invincible Versus as far as I can tell). Published by Skybound Games, it’s based on the Invincible comics and show, which you might’ve heard of.
For the uninitiated, the Image Comics run started in 2003 and ended after 15 years and 144 issues, following the story of Mark Grayson, also known as Invincible (I won’t say much more for fear of unintended spoilers should you decide to watch the show). Speaking of the show, it can be found on Amazon Prime and is renouned for being audio described and having been so for a number of years, making it accessible to all. But does this brand new fighting game stand up to that legacy?
Invincible as a series has already had a fighting game outing, in the form of key character Omni-man appearing in the aforementioned Mortal Kombat 1. It was great to be able to play as a character from a show I’d started watching at the time, with audio description for his finishing moves that even referenced the show itself and adhered to the violence that it involved, but seeing a game built around the IP itself was a surprise that I was interested to look into first-hand after it was announced.
Honouring a convention found in the show of finishing a sentence with the name of this multi-media franchise, with the hope of so many blind fighting game enthusiasts backing me up, let’s dive into this review and see what accessibility as a gamer without sight is like in *title card*.
Note
The below review was primarily conducted using the PC version, though other platforms were tested where possible.
First Boot
Booting the game up, regardless of platform, there are various warnings presented including around photosensitivity, though none of these are narrated or spoken in any fashion that is accessible without workarounds. You also get a warning that runs as follows, which is also not spoken:
THIS GAME CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE, AND SCENES OF EXPLICIT VIOLENCE AND GORE.
NO, SERIOUSLY. THERE’S A LOT OF BLOOD. BUCKLE UP
Having warnings like these as well as descriptions for any logos is hugely useful, as you’re providing health warnings to players who may need to be aware of them before they even start a game like this, as well as giving information about content.
The intro
The game’s intro cinematic then plays, alongside the names of various studios responsible for the game itself. Unfortunately, as epic and interesting as this intro is, there are no subtitles for it that I could determine and key for me, there is no audio description. This means that even though the show this is based on is watchable without assistance or the need to follow online transcripts, the game already loses a proverbial point for lacking accessibility, though I hope this could be rectified in a future update with the right resource availability, allocation and consultancy so that everyone can enjoy this without having to read a guide to know what’s going on.
The Game Itself
With the game’s hip-hop adjacent theme booming out at you, you are advised to “press any button to start”.
After doing so, alongside a response and snappy confirmation sound, you are presented with a license agreement, which again, is not narrated. The absence of something that has become more common over the past few years stood out to me, even after having played in the alpha build of Invincible VS, as well as its open beta which took place mere weeks before the game launched.
Thankfully, scrolling down via holding down on the DPad, then pressing A on my Xbox controller allowed me to confirm and proceed to the next screen.
The following several screens show information on what you can do in the various modes such as story, training and extras, as well as let you know about the player profile and crossplay elements. Unfortunately, there is no clear UI sound when hitting next, so you’d have to move up and down between each screen to make sure you’re not in the main menu before pressing confirm again to move forward. After all, you wouldn’t want to accidentally start story mode without having gone into a tutorial or adjusted options, for example.
You can find a (slightly modified) transcript, courtesy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) below so you can get an idea of what’s included:
First Boot Tutorial Information
- WELCOME TO INVINCIBLE VS
GET READY TO GET BLOODY! 3V3 ACTION IS JUST MOMENTS AWAY. HERE’S A QUICK
RUNDOWN OF THE DIFFERENT FEATURES IN STORE. - SINGLE PLAYER
IN SINGLE PLAYER, PLAY THROUGH A COMPLETELY ORIGINAL INVINCIBLE STORY IN
STORY MODE, OR FIGHT THROUGH A GAUNTLET OF BATTLES IN ARCADE MODE. - VERSUS
PARTICIPATE IN LOCAL, CASUAL, AND RANKED ONLINE MATCHES!
- TRAINING
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FIGHTERS AND HOW TO PLAY. - EXTRAS
CHECK OUT THE ART, MUSIC, AND MOVIES YOU’VE COLLECTED OR ANALYZE YOUR
OWN MATCHES. - PLAYER PROFILE
HIT THE i TO OPEN YOUR PLAYER PROFILE. FROM THERE YOU CAN CHECK YOUR
PLAYER AND CHARACTER PROGRESSION, SET UP YOUR ONLINE TEAM LOADOUT, AND
CUSTOMIZE YOUR PLAYER CARD. - SOCIAL HUB
HIT THE TO OPEN YOUR FRIENDS LIST. FROM HERE YOU CAN ADD PLAYERS,
VIEW THEIR PROFILES, AND INVITE THEM TO PLAY. - CROSSPLAY
PLEASE NOTE THAT CROSSPLAY IS AVAILABLE FOR ALL ONLINE GAME MODES! YOU
MAY CHANGE WHETHER CROSSPLAY IS ENABLED OR DISABLED AT ANY TIME IN
“ONLINE SETTINGS”.
As you can see from the above, even in a format where I’ve stripped out some of the instructions like next or finish for the sake of readability, required buttons for activating functions weren’t rendered properly so I wouldn’t know how to open my profile or friends list without trial and error. This is something that can be particularly uncomfortable, even for veteran players, as there are occasions where pressing the incorrect button can get you hopelessly lost (as you’ll see later).
Elements of the setup process and other aspects, such as the above button prompts, are sometimes covered in guides like this google doc courtesy of BlindsightBlue and the Sento Showdown team which was created for the open beta, though such documents should not have to be relied on by players or their creation anticipated in the first place.
But now we’re in the main menu, let’s get to configuring things.Options And Settings
As much as having narration would help exponentially on so many screens, thankfully, the main menu doesn’t wrap, meaning you can, on PC, go down to the very bottom of the menu and up one, then hit confirm to get into settings.
The settings menu consists of a series of items in a list, one of which is accessibility. At first, it appeared as if this menu was bugged, as I couldn’t seem to be able to see anything other than graphical options. I’m not sure why this was, but I did eventually manage to get into the accessibility menu subsequently, so put it down to teething problems with the build and my unfamiliarity with the structure of this title.
As much as it’s great to see an accessibility menu, it sadly consists solely of 3 options. These are Creator mode (which disables blood and gore), subtitles (which are off by default in contravention of what I’d hoped was an industry standard by now), and language, at least as far as I could determine.
This seemed like a very odd mix to me personally as those settings are usually found in places outside the accessibility menu traditionally. Also, this menu does not include things that Mortal Kombat 1, a fighting game that has led the way for the past 3 years in the field contains and I would have liked to have seen, including but not limited to audio description, menu narration and individual audio customisation for things like hit type cues and footsteps, to name a couple of the specifics.
This very much had me concerned, even if the beta build understandably had less features than the final game, though I was also aware that game development takes time and implementing such features is sometimes not as straightforward as we’d like it to be.
With settings adjusted where I felt was needed, mostly turning the music down, I thought I’d dive into the tutorial to see what I’d gotten myself into.
Tutorials
For reference, the game uses a system of light, medium, heavy and special inputs, along with directions. Though quarter circle and other motion inputs are available, they are not tutorialised, you only learn a simplified set of inputs, presumably to cater to those who might be treating this as their first fighting game or the first in the genre of tag fighters. This does feel odd at times as someone who appreciates the feel of motion controls in Killer Instinct whilst using that game’s combo assist mode for execution efficiency during combos, but I can appreciate the simplicity as well.
The tutorials, whilst they start off straightforward enough aside from the fact that you have to use OCR to read them of course, quickly become overly complicated without a guide. This is particularly relevant a few tutorials in when you have multiple objectives to complete on a single screen; this was my first real roadblock with this resource.
Why is this a roadblock? Because keeping track of what you’ve used and what you have left to achieve is next to impossible, at least it was for me during the assists tutorial using OCR.
I attempted to do this multiple times, even looked at using a local AI setup I have to scan the image for me to see what I had left to do (the latter of which can be helpful though it should only really be the very last resort as AI itself can be unreliable), unfortunately without success. Narration would’ve resolved this issue easily, especially with a way to repeat what I have left to achieve and how to do so as you might find in Mortal Kombat 1.
I ended up using the above Sento Showdown guide to complete it on both PlayStation and PC, but had to keep referring back to it in order to reference specifically named mechanics. For example, given I couldn’t easily refer to the controls in-game, I had to read the guide to learn that assist 2 is mapped to L1. Knowing this meant that I could then execute the various assist objectives tied to that button and thus progress, though it was annoying to be blocked by something as straightforward as a lack of what inputs to press, when that’s the least of my worries compared to mechanical depth which I struggle with at times in tag titles.
Story Mode
After getting initially frustrated with the tutorial, I decided to jump into story mode. As anticipated, it did not have audio description, unfortunate as the cutscenes make up the bulk of the experience of course.
There were noticeable differences in the audio quality of some scenes as I played through and, coupled with the lack of use of there stereo field in sequences, it gave the game a less polished feel than it arguably deserves given the quality of the series and franchise that fans may come to expect. However, the dialogue and atmosphere felt well-put together and I enjoyed what I experienced even if things were a little harder to follow than they otherwise might be with a more accessible mode (don’t worry, I won’t be spoiling the story or going into detail here).
Even though I had the game set to its lowest difficulty, the CPU continued to show signs of utilising input reading (a common tactic from the arcade era that was designed to steal players money, or in this case, their time and make the game hard for the sake of it). I am never a fan of having this mechanic be so obvious, though I suppose that’s better than having it be subtle and underhanded. However, I am surprised and frustrated to see this padding tactic return to fighting games, especially when it comes to a title like this that has a lot of complexity that the AI definitely shows off in spades at times.
That being said, the voice acting and score remain solid here, as does the trash talking during battles that help flesh out character relationships. If you haven’t watched the show, you likely won’t get all the references, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun as a newcomer.
upon beating the experience initially on its lowest difficulty as referenced above, there appeared to be no achievement for completing the story mode, nor for any story-specific elements like passing certain milestones), making the mode feel a little less valuable than it might do in other fighting games. That being said, the mode did allow me to level up even when I played it on PS5, without me going into arcade mode as I’d already done on PC.
As you’ll see later though, trophies had their own barriers to entry and I wasn’t done with story mode yet.
Arcade Mode
For decades, arcade mode has been a staple of the fighting game genre, complete with ridiculous bosses. Invincible VS somewhat lives up to that, with multiple numbers of matches to win, as well as the ability to unlock rewards, including customisations for your player profile. However, it seemed to lack a final boss in the sense of a final fight with a different character that is unplayable, which seemed odd to me as superhero games have achieved this in the past.
When I went to test this mode out, first selecting a number of matches and then moving left and right to choose a difficulty (where I was met by sci-fi style sound cues that are also present in other difficulty selection screens amping up the intensity as I went through them in a non-wrapping fashion), I managed to get through a 5 match ladder with relative ease. Keep in mind that I hadn’t completed the tutorial when this first happened, but nevertheless, I was proud of myself for managing to get enough attacks together to defeat various teams of 3.
In between matches however, after I’d won, I was presented with various rewards that I’d earned, as well as XP towards character and player level. In Mortal kombat one, now seen as the gold standard for fighting games by some, you would hear these spoken and know what they were as you earned them. However, in this game, with the lack of narration, you have no such luck and are forced to press confirm through multiple audio cues with no idea of what you’re unlocking and how your journey is progressing, which is unfortunate.
equipping these unlockables, such as the one above, though theoretically possible, was a tedious process that seemingly gave no real benefit as a gamer without sight, particularly as there’s no menu narration to make that process easier (see refrences to the player profile later in this review). OCR does read the fonts relatively well, but it just makes things take so much longer than they otherwise would do, either with sight or accessibility baked in. Having completed a ladder and checked out some of the cosmetic customisations, I eventually returned to the story experience.
Back To Story Mode
Having no audio description (making it less enjoyable or entertaining for me personally) and wanting to see how many fights there were, as well as how difficult they might be later on, I tried pressing buttons and discovered that pressing B then holding X skips cutscenes in story, which was very useful even if I then might not understand who I was fighting and why.
If you want to get the story trophy for beating the mode on normal difficulty or higher, I also found out that you can just complete story on easy then turn difficulty up to normal after picking up where you left off, which turns out to be the final battle, seemingly the second option once you’ve gone into the story mode area of the UI (where the music changes).
I also did see that there was a trophy for completing the mode on hard or higher, but in playing the game on its hardest setting (as I couldn’t tell if this was the hard difficulty or something even more formidable), I discovered that the AI doesn’t pull its proverbial punches and that having text that could OCR to illustrate the difficulty would’ve really been useful here.
Online play
Unfortunately I was unable to test online play in advance of the game going live. I’ll update this review as I try and work out how adding friends etc works in practice, as a friends list is mentioned in the introductory tutorial. It’ll be interesting to see how well this game holds up when multiple gamers without sight get to play against each other in controlled settings rather than matching in ranked and the like, particularly as a more casual member of the fighting game community (FGC) myself.
The Question Of Cross-Progression
Unlike games such as Gears 5, where if you’re signed into the same account on multiple devices your progress will syncronise, Invincible VS does not afford you such a luxury. This means that you’ll have to earn every trophy multiple times, even the hardest possible ones (which of course might be different for every player). Though I dislike having an account for every single game or app, there are times where it can be of use to have available and I know I’d utilise it here, as would others who purchase the game in different places to play with friends who might prefer PC or a console for example.
Training mode and settings
Heading into training mode, you’ll notice that the lack of menu narration makes it difficult to even quit the game at first, at least without additional workarounds, patience, or both. For reference, if you haven’t moved through the training menu system and press LB or L1 on controller and then go up one and hit confirm, you should leave practice mode and be put back at the main menu.
No narration also, of course, means that you can’t as easily adjust settings to set up scenarios, something that could be incredibly useful with the frantic style of gameplay this title goes for, which includes things like air dashing and blocking, as well as different types of jumps and a complex counter tag and assist system.
The above settings menu screenshot, only a small part of the training infrastructure, reinforces the need for robust UI accessibility not just in fighting games, but in general and that, for me at least, includes menu narration, though I know that has been a tricky piece of tech to implement over the years. Hopefully it will become more straightforward with advancements in engine accessibility.
Trophies and Achievements
Using the PS5 version as an easy way to refer to all the trophies available at once, I discovered that there are in fact trophies for completing story mode on higher difficulties than easy, including hard or higher. This is an issue if players can’t get past the AI being a festival of input reading, which it definitely seemed to do when I attempted to face it on the hardest possible setting as mentioned previously.
Difficulty and achievements have been a topic of conversation for many years now and, as someone who has been blocked from achieving platinum trophies in various games by that simple choice, can say that it leaves a sour taste in my mouth, regardless of how good the game is.
There are actually trophies for things like beating certain types of arcade tower as well, though whether the they related to difficulty or not was hard to tell, as the OCR experience and what the achievement were asking for did not match up. For example, one trophy calls for completion of a Guardian arcade Ladder, but I couldn’t see a reference to that anywhere in the UI, at least not on my own.
Player Profile and Loadouts
As previously mentioned, customising your player profile (which is required for a trophy) is doable with OCR and patience. Having alt text to describe what the elements that you’re changing look like or show if they are backgrounds, for instance would be very helpful, otherwise they are just names that mean comparatively nothing would make a huge difference to the experience. That’s not where the struggles end, however.
In recent years we’ve seen a lot of fighting games forcing you to set teams prior to going online, lest you be stuck with a default preset. Unfortunately, this game is no exception and even though the character select screen does announce the names of your fighters as you move over them, you’d still have to use OCR to attempt to even get to the point of overwriting a preset and making sure you’re removing the correct one.
With that point of discussion out of the way, let’s look at more general aspects.
Sound Design, Score and Gameplay
I’ve talked a little about the score and sound design so far, but let’s go into things a little more deeply.
I am a big fan of impactful sound design in fighting games, or games in general. When things connect with impact visually, being able to react to what’s happening in the same way as sighted players can just based off the audio is a great feeling. Invincible VS has an interesting problem in the audio department, partly brought on by the choice of sub-genre of fighting games (in that it’s a 3v3, air and ground-based tag fighter), which doesn’t mesh as well historically with the bloody, impactful crunchy sounds of the likes of Mortal Kombat which you would hope it might draw from.
Given how much action is on screen at once and how frequently characters switch in and out, this game takes more cues from games like Marvel VS Capcom and Street Fighter than it does from its more violent relatives, something I feared even in the early days of this title’s promotion. Hoping that this might change, though the sound design has grown on me whilst I’ve played the game first-hand, the end result is that hits sound relatively weak and with no way to adjust their level relative to other sounds, the impact is mostly lost. This is a real shame since Killer Instinct had such solid impacts and even watching it now I can still tell what’s going on to a much greater degree than I can ever do in a 3v3 tag fighter like Invincible VS and I had hoped this game might share similar levels of punch, pun intended.
Though partly related to audio but also to accessibility directly, another interesting note is that, given its focus on combos, it’s somewhat surprising to see no equivalent to Killer Instinct’s HUD meter volume slider in this title. I point this out as that feature allows players to hear when they’re going to blow out a combo (i.e. have it drop entirely), something that you want to avoid if you can. Without this, you have no sense of what moves are increasing your combo or how close your opponent might be to dropping their own combo through lack of observation. Here’s hoping this and other features could be added later down the line as the original HUD meter volume slider was for KI 2013.
The score for this game whilst it does have a certain aesthetic which might not be to everyone’s tastes, sounding like something closer to Tekken 5’s soundtrack than it does to anything you might expect from a superhero game, does have a certain charm. The menu theme is probably the most recognisable, with the percussion side of things as well as the bass cutting through the mix and making for a unique experience when watching with the audio options at their default settings. I’d never heard of the artists behind this score before, but I’m curious to hear their music in other contexts as well now that I’ve seen how confidently they work with this source material.
The announcer is very much a point of hype and, interestingly, it seems as though he has been put to use as an indication of who is achieving what in terms of combos, counter tags etc. By this I mean that he is panned to the left or right to match player 1 or 2’s UI respectively.
Whilst this is a great idea in concept, it does mean that things feel a little more disjointed and confusing than having a singular announcer acting as what is sometimes termed the “”voice of god””, presiding over the entire match at once which I personally prefer, with other UI cues taking over for individual elements where required. This is particularly evident when trying to work out who counter tagged or who performed what during the frantic pacing of mirror matches (which do happen).
Such cues do exist for things like ultimates and assist availability, but they are usually drowned out by the carnage that is happening at any given moment. Customisability through granular sliders, once again, would help with this, though an audio glossary wouldn’t go amiss either as the only way to realistically learn these sounds currently is either through the training mode or the tutorial, neither of which are necessarily useful if you just want a quick reference.
In short though, the game does feel cohesive and powerful when it wants to, even if the force behind it isn’t as apparent in the flow of anything that isn’t the highest level attacks.
Summary
Pros
- Great sound design and score to match the show
- Solid, if frantic feeling gameplay regardless of platform
- Stereo panning and audio cues are useful for gaging assist availability and other relevant elements
- Authentic voice acting both in general and in story mode, shout out to the arcade-style announcer as well
- Motion inputs are available as well as simplified ones, opening this game and genre up to more potential players
Cons
- No menu narration, meaning OCR or community guides are currently required for ease of use and consistency
- No audio description, including for story cutscenes or ultimates
- Game relies too heavily on knowing characters by sight in some instances, including when setting a loadout for an online team or checking who your loadouts are
- Audio cues aren’t always audible in the heat of battle, with no glossary or granular sliders to improve this
- Combo gage audio equivalent is missing, making it harder to work with than it could be Very advanced mechanical systems at play might turn more casual players away, even with motion inputs being available
Conclusions
Invincible VS is a title that, whilst it shows potential, doesn’t quite soar to the heights I and others hoped for, at least in this initial launch period. After all, it is missing a key component that would allow gamers without sight to adjust settings and play online with confidence, that being menu narration.
That being said, whilst it’s not my kind of game usually, I enjoyed it and this debut title from the studio shows promise. The developers clearly care about listening to their community for feedback from what I’ve heard, so who knows what we might see in the future.
As much as this is a solid fighting game, this is not a solidly accessible fighting game, unfortunately, though I hope that can change with future updates and patches given the foundations that are being worked with. I would honestly recommend people go for the base edition unless they really want the additional characters, though of course we haven’t even been able to see how those impact the meta, to use a popular term for overall strategies used by players in games of a variety of genres.
That being said, Invincible VS has a lot of potential. If you can get past the complex learning curve and rather odd-feeling controls, you’re into 3v3 tag fighters with a fast pace and want a violent and frantic superhero brawler, as well as having the patience to get around menus with OCR and memorisation, this game might just be for you.
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