Since the dawn of fighting games control wielding individuals have loved playing as different characters beating the shit out of their friends. Whether your style is button mashing or carefully executed combos, there are countless hours of fun to be had. Following closely in this fashion with no qualms to be had is NetherRealms Studios, Injustice: Gods Among Us.
This game is fantastic on so many many levels.What else can you expect from the creators of Mortal Combat? Let’s start with the story line. It’s amazing. A perfect execution of time and dimension travel that deals with duplicates of all of out favorite Justice League and DC characters and villains. This awesome little detail enables you to fight against the character that your playing as without a cliche negative character. This aside, the story line in general was just fucking awesome. Elements of deceit, honor, and courage all come into play. This and a bunch of WHAT THE HELL moments. I’d say seeing Lex Luthor and Superman as friends in an alternate universe kind of made my mind explode. I like also how differently that the writers portrayed the characters from previous story lines. Usually, Superman can only be defeated by weakening him with kryptonite. In this story line everyone else takes a pill to make them stronger and able to combat him. For instance, let’s take Green Arrow, who is usually kind of a puss of a character. He instantly becomes the epitome of quick and fierce badass in this game because of the pill he takes.
Now for the best part of this immaculate conception of comic book video game awesome, the game play. The creators of this game paid so much attention to detail that it shined through every character. Each character had special moves that were executed when when their meter was full and both trigger buttons were pushed. Each special move was created for the character and seriously amazing. The graphics and attention to each characters back story prior to this games was perfectly placed in each move. My personal favorite from this group of special moves was Aquaman, another seeming puss character. When his is performed a flood of water and sea creatures erupts and attacks his enemy. He then spears said enemy with his trident and holds them in the air, leaving him as bait for a great white that bites him off of the trident and slams him back on the ground. So epic. You can also use the environment to injure enemies. This can be done my swinging on chandeliers or throwing a piano in Wayne Manor. You can also fling villain into a different stage by executing a certain move. I will say this about the game play, this is definitely not a button masher. You can get away with it for the first couple rounds, but when the enemies start getting more difficult it takes a perfectly timed combination of attacks to defeat them.
I loved this game. It was so well done, the story line was original. I feel like DC game is following in suit with the Arkham games with this release, and definitely have a serious leg up on Marvel. The graphics were aesthetically astounding and the gameplay was almost flawless. The one serious grievance I had with this game was the scale of larger characters to smaller characters. For instance, if you are playing as Batman and you are fighting Raven, if you are not staring in a precise place your range moves will not work. The smaller characters are almost invisible to any larger characters attack. Which seems to be par, however, it becomes more evident that it’s a flaw in later levels. I also was not a fan of the wager option. It always feel like the computer will win no matter what the meter is. However, this by no means negates how awesome this game is. Pick it up now.