It has been a long time since I played the first Injustice but I still fondly remember it as one of my favorite ever fighting game and one of the very few video games to have a truly awesome story. So it was with a lot of anticipation that I wanted to play this sequel. In fact I even bought a fighting stick for it, my first ever, though it is the cheap and small Hori Mini Fighting Stick. I had a lot of trouble pulling off moves that require a quick backward-forward movement on the thumbsticks of the usual gamepads and thought this might be better and it really did help a lot. Unfortunately while this sequel’s mechanics are solid, the story is awful and really spoiled the experience for me.
The Story Mode here actually begins with a short prequel sequence that shows how Damian Wayne Robin switched from being Batman’s sidekick to supporting the despotic Superman’s Regime. But the main story takes place after the events of the first game after Superman has been imprisoned. Batman realizes that even though the Regime has been deposed, the world still needs heroes to fight against threats. In particular he sends Green Arrow, Black Canary and a reformed Harley Quinn to oppose Gorilla Grodd and his new supervillain group called the Society. However they realize that the true power behind the group is Brainiac who soon launches an invasion to collect cities and specimens from Earth and then destroy the rest of the planet. A subplot deals with Kara Zor-El being a survivor of Brainiac’s invasion of Krypton but arrived on Earth only after the events of the first game. She of course starts out on Superman’s side but eventually realizes how warped he has become, even as both sides reluctantly team up against Brainiac.
At first it seems that the story could be good because they clearly spent a lot of time and effort on it. The cinematics are so long that I think it might take more time to watch through them all than actually fight the matches if you’re a decent player. The world graphics are merely average but the graphics for the characters, the various stages and especially the facial animations are incredible. Unfortunately the plot here is insipid with Brainiac’s invasion being boring and straightforward. The only character here with any real arc or development is Supergirl and she has too little screen time. The real are merely continuations of who they were before. Worse, it’s positively stupid how some characters pop up for a fight for no real in-story reason. Atrocitus is the prime example here. Characters nominally on the same side fight one another just to knock each other around a bit so that they can have a talk. It’s downright insulting how awful all this is.
Still the game mechanics seem pretty solid to me and I can even appreciate them better now that I have a fighting stick and can actually learn and pull off combos. In addition to pulling off the spectacular supermoves, you can expend charges off of the supermeter to do escapes or supercharge special moves. This is actually a much better use of the charges as supermoves are easily blocked or avoided anyway. Best of all, the game comes with a very extensive tutorial system that teaches you all of these mechanics, strategies and a basic primer on how to use each character. It’s far and away the best tutorial for any fighting game I’ve ever seen, covering even the concept of frame advantage of different moves. It helped me understand stuff that I’ve only been sloppily muddling through in years of playing these games.
More controversial is how the characters have levels now and have slots for equipment. The higher your level, the better the gear you can use and since these directly boost stats like Strength, Defense, Life etc., they make a tremendous difference. You gain levels by fighting with the characters and taking one up to the maximum level of 30 is quite a grind. You gain the gear mostly by opening motherboxes, literal loot boxes. Playing through the story mode will earn you a fair number of these boxes and you can buy them with the in=game currency as well. But mostly you’re supposed to participate in Multiverse events to earn them. They’re a kind of extended story after the main story as the character deal with crises across the multiverse. There’s not much more to them than just a blurb but they’re a great excuse for having an endless series of fights. If that’s not enough there’s Multiverse Legendary as well but I’d need to play a whole lot more to unlock the requirements for that.
I normally don’t much care for grinds like this but I do admit that it’s addictive. Collecting the different bits of gear and seeing the cosmetic changes they make to the different characters is appealing as well. Plus since I felt like playing a whole lot more in single player mode to get good than what is possible in the story mode, why not go along? For my part, I chose to specialize in Black Adam as he can solid tools and easy to learn combos that are very powerful. His main downside for me is that his back-strong attack, which every character has to throw opponents back a fair distance, is very short ranged. Also he doesn’t seem to have good anti-air options. I played around with other characters too. I like Supergirl’s moveset in theory but in practice her reach is so short that it’s hard to start a combo safely. Note that playing through the story mode levels the characters too but as you mostly play the heroes, you end up with a roster of hero characters with higher levels than the villains.
One odd inclusion is that just as you have gear loadouts for each character, you get AI loadouts as well. These even come with a special page for you to tweak the AI’s attributes. This means that when you get tired of playing but still want to grind levels or loot boxes, you can have the AI do it for you. Just enter a Multiverse event, select the character and an AI loadout and it does all the work for you. As one Steam user noted, if you max out the Counter and Combo stats for the AI, it’s practically invincible and can beat any Multiverse event. It sure as heck can play a lot better than I can. I have no idea why they included this mode as it seems a little silly but it is a way to grind with no effort.
Overall I can’t emphasize enough how much I hate the story mode in this game especially since the one in the first game was so good. Yet I sure do appreciate the in-game tutorial here, which combined with the fighting stick, finally allowed me to feel that I actually know what I’m doing in these games. I’m never going to be very good at these and I don’t even react fast enough to actually use roll escapes and air escapes. I’m happy that I can even pull off basic combos now and I’m not just mashing buttons. Now that I do have a stick, even just a cheap and simple one, I think I’ll want to try out more such games.
