Ever since the early years of video games, superheroes have been around. As a child I freaked on hero inspired games like the Spiderman series and Marvel vs. Capcom franchise; as an adult, I still enjoy superhero games. The best recent superhero game, in my opinion, is Injustice: Gods Among Us, and I am not the only one who has this opinion since it won the award for “Best Fighting Game” of E3 2012 and was praised by many critics. So when Injustice 2 was announced I was super hyped for the sequel of one of my favorite games of all time.

Injustice 2 is like its predecessor a fighting game from NetherRealm Studios who also made the recent Mortal Kombat games. In Injustice you fight as superheroes and villains from the DC universe. It takes some elements from  Mortal Kombat but it still feels like a unique game rather than just a superhero spinoff.

Fan-favorite characters from Injustice: Gods Among Us are still on the roster but a lot of new and surprising characters were added to it. The roster, in general, is very versatile and features many different fighting styles. Characters like Bane and Gorilla Grodd can take a few punches, do tons of damage once they get to you but are very slow.

Other characters such as Catwoman and Cheetah are very fast and combo based. In my opinion, the coolest fighters are zone characters who focus on outranging their opponent and poke them down until they see an opportunity to go in to finish them off. In this g, me there are lots of different playstyles and every character feels very different from each other.

The mechanics of Injustice are easy to pick up but hard the master, the perfect balance for a fighting game in my opinion. Just bashing on random buttons can give you pretty good results in the beginning. But if you are a fighting game vigilante there are still some special moves you can use to spice up your combo. Each character has different special moves but the inputs for these moves are mostly the same and are fairly easy to pull off. If you can do a Hadouken (in Street Fighter) you should be able to use every special move from Injustice.

Another thing to note is the special meter, this meter is filled when taking damage, performing a combo or special attack or when you take damage. The meter can be used to boost your special moves or a new feature where you use the bar of your meter as an escape option when you are being combed. When the meter is full the fun really starts to happen, you can now perform your ultimate move, these moves are unique for every character and start a cinematic where your character combos the opponent in spectacular ways. To give an example the Flash takes his opponent to a sphinx and slams him to the nose of the sphinx to then take him back to the time of the dinosaurs to hit it with his opponent to then take it back the present day for a final impact. These special moves can be a game changer and are easily done by just pressing L2 and R2 at the same time. Every special move is very cool and funny to watch.

A good story mode is something uncommon in fighting games but the story of Injustice 2 is truly amazing. The story is very good with amazing cinematic which gives every character his/her own personality. It felt more like I watched superhero movie where I just had to play the fightings scenes. Did I say a movie because I meant like 2 or 3 movies because the story mode is very long especially for a fighting game and it was sometimes hard to believe the characters were animation instead of real actors because they look so good.

Once you finished the story mode there are still a lot of things to do in Injustice, like the new game mode Multiverse: a game mode where you have to fight different opponents with different stats or circumstances like double damage or slower physics. The challenges are randomly selected and must be beaten before the challenge expires so there is always something to do after you beat the story.

When you beat a chapter from the story mode or beat a challenge from the Multiverse you get chests depending on how well you did. These chests contain items you can use to upgrade your fighters and customise them. This adds a RPG element to a fighting game which is pretty cool. Fighting with a character gains XP to level up. Once you level up your fighter, the stats are increased and you are able to equip better gear.

If you want to give your character equipment that he can’t wear because he is too low-level you have the option to downgrade the item to the level of your character for the cost of some stat reduce. Another thing I definitely dig is the option to swap stats for different items. If you have a very strong item that does not fit the look you were going for you can swap them so you can have a good-looking strong fighter.

The thing I love about fighting games is showing you are better than others and what is a better place to show your skills than online. Injustice 2 has both casual and ranked matches and friend matches. I really was surprised to see that in all of my online matches I experienced no lag at all. Finding opponents went easy, loading the game was quick. This is really the perfect online fighting game experience.

Conclusion:

Injustice: Gods Among Us was a nearly perfect game but Injustice 2 is even better and improves an already great game. There is so much content in this game it’s unbelievable. Fair enough, there’s one thing I did not like; the Joker looks kind of weird and does not look like the joker but that’s the only thing I can possibly think of. This game is perfect and I hope they will keep adding new content to this masterpiece.

9.5/10