Gamescom 2012: Injustice: Gods Among Us

At Gamescom there are many games to tryout, some you will see this year and some you will see next year.

The first game we came across was at the Warner Brothers booth with a chance to play the upcoming DC Comics fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us.

The pits some of DC Comics greats heroes and villains against one another in a brutal brawl to emerge the victor of each bout. At the show we got to get our hands on the current roster of character currently available for the title which featured: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Cyborg, Nightwing, Solomon Grundy and the lovely, Harley Quinn. Unfortunately, Catwoman who was announced at Gamescom did not feature in the playable demo for the game. With that we got a chance to play each and every one of those characters in one of two arenas, the dark caverns below Wayne Manor in the Batcave and the lonely fortress for the last son of Krypton at the Fortress of Solitude.

As for how the game plays, if you have played NetherRealms previous title, Mortal Kombat, you will feel right at home with this game. The combat plays almost exactly like Mortal Kombat with combos and special moves being pretty much the same as many of the characters from the title, but this is not an issue, why break what isn’t broken? The gameplay is slick with characters using not only their fists but also their powers and gadgets to help take down each opponent and by pressing start you can look up all of the special moves each character can do if you wanted to.  Also, all character have two health bars, one being armour bar that will break eventually, and then you have your health bar, once these have both be depleted the match ends which is what you would expect to happen.

On top of which the game does feature some special moves similar to the X-Ray moves done in Mortal Kombat. These moves work differently with the player having to attack the opposing player to activate their move which can dish out a serious amount of damage. The problem is, despite the game being a fighting game it isn’t that violent or bloody which isn’t a bad thing when comparing it other fighting games, but when you know who the developer is and what they have made this is an incredibly tame game from the studio. However, you then have to take to account that they do not own the rights to these characters so DC Comics may not want their characters to kill each other simply because a lot of them won’t kill, it’s just not in their character.

Then we have the environments. The game has taken details from the comics and carefully transferred them into the game as assets to use in each fight with objects hanging from the ceiling, objects on the floor or anything else in the map for that matter it all adds to environment which suffers from battle damage so by the end of the fight you could literally wreck Batman’s Batcave or Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

Injustice: Gods Among Us is the first game we played at this years Gamescom. The game looked impressive but becomes much more impressive when you actually get a chance to play the game in person and certainly is looking like the best fighting game coming out next year.

Injustice: Gods Among Us is expected to hit retail shelves in 2013.