For those that can’t wait another couple of weeks for Injustice: Gods Among Us to hit shelves everywhere a demo just dropped on X-box Live on Wednesday night. While a lot of features are locked away the demo does give us a good idea of the speed of combat, the type of moves that can be utilized, and the environments in the game.
The demo consists of two player multiplayer, which I did not get to try out, and a single player battle experience where you fight a total of 4 characters. You can choose either Batman and Wonder Woman to Lex Luther and Doomsday along with the requisite doppelgangers of the heroes. The character models and the environments are beautiful and even the menus themselves are much better than previous Mortal Kombat games.
Speaking of Mortal Kombat and how it compares to Injustice, the move set in Injustice seems to be much simpler than past games as most of the moves are variations of the same two or three commands. You can press down and forward and a button, down and back and a button, back and forward and a button or forward and back and a button. Not a lot of variety, but the moves are broadened a bit by the combos you can pull off when you chain these moves, the normal punches and kicks, and the new environmental effects together into devastating looking chains. For instance with Batman you can start with a few punches, kick them away a bit while throwing a few batarangs at them as they are falling, follow that up with a grapple pulling them back to you, kick them into a helicopter floating nearby and finish it up by using your super “finishing” move and calling in the batmobile to run them over. This doesn’t even take into account the multi-tiered stages which you can also activate in the middle of a combo. All in all, the basic move sets may be easy to pull off, it’s the combos that will prove to be the challenge and what determines the good player from the bad.
Both Batman and Wonder Woman both, while having virtually the same moves, had different styles of play as Wonder Woman can replace her lasso with a sword and shield if you would rather go on the offensive. Batman, meanwhile, has several different moves he can pull off once he calls in a swarm of three electronic bats that hover around him. He can use them as a purely defensive move, use them to pull off a stronger move, or toss them at his opponent. Besides these unique moves, what really sets the characters apart are their “finishing” moves, for lack of a better term. These moves can be pulled off by filling up your power meter and pulling both triggers and landing a hit on your opponent. In the amount of time I have been able to play I have only used Batman’s finisher, but they proved to be a site to behold. Just a note for those playing though, if the “hit” is blocked after pulling the triggers you will lose the entire power bar and the move will not fire. I learned that the hard way quite a few times.
Overall, the demo did exactly what I had hoped it would do: get me even more excited about the game. The only negative I felt the demo had was that it was a bit too easy. I found myself beating the opponents on all but the highest difficulty by just using basic kicks and punches, only having to resort to using the power moves on the highest difficulty. I’m hoping the final game is a little bit harder or the game might be easy to breeze through. Regardless it was a lot of fun and I recommend it for anyone interested in the DCU or fighting games in general. After the demo is beaten you get a sneak peak at other features of the game which shows that there is a surprising amount of depth to the game past the basic battle mode in the demo. I’m expecting a lot based on what I’ve seen so far. Lets see if the final game holds up on the 16th. Until then, check back soon for my final look at the launch DLC for the game with the Blackest Night skins.
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