One of the big reveals from the Xbox Showcase was that Invincible VS is on its way, and we were able to chat with members of Skybounds’s Quarter Up at IGN Live to learn why this 3v3 fighting game is giving Robert Kirkman’s superhero epic the tag fighter it deserves, complete with Killer Instinct influences.
Invincible VS features fan-favorite characters from the comics and animated series, including Mark Grayson (Invincible), Omni-Man, Thula, AtomEve, and Bulletproof, but one of the main reasons the title is a 3v3 fighter is because of the series’ many teams. For art director Dan Eder and combat designer Reepal Parbhoo, this made the choice for what type of game this would be an easy one.
“In general, when you’re watching the Invincible series or reading the comics, the team format really stands out, right?” Parbhoo posits. “You’ve got teams like Teen Team, you’ve got Guardians of the Globe, you’ve got the Global Defense Agency, you’ve got the Viltrumites. So, I think that naturally lends to a multi-team format versus a standard one-person one “
While teams may have informed the type of game, Invincible VS is obviously all about the characters, and the team needed to nail that aspect by making each one as authentic as possible.
“We really wanted to do the characters justice,” Eder said. “The overall aesthetic of the show was a huge inspiration for us, but also we had to adapt it to a video game, right? So, there were a lot of decisions that had to be made with high levels of detail, rendering style, overall anatomy, and more. Do we go realistic? Do we go a little bit more stylized? We wanted to capture a really interesting 2D-3D sort of hybrid where characters are, for the most part, pretty realistically lit, but then you have an outline.
“At the end of the day, we wanted this to feel like an authentic representation of the characters that the show and the comic. Thankfully, with Invincible, there’s so much inspiration and reference to pull from that made it easy for us.”
With the characters and game type out of the way, we shifted our chat to the combat itself. Killer Instinct fans was be delighted to know that Invincible VS is the debut title for Skybound’s Quarter Up studio, which is led by former members of the core Killer Instinct (2013) dev team.
“Killer Instinct was a 1v1 tag fighter, but there’s a big impact in a lot of the hits, right? So we’ve brought that over to Invincible VS,” Parbhoo said. “However, the core of the Killer Instinct influence in here is with that two-way interaction between offense and defense. A lot of the time in Killer Instinct, you could react to the combos. If you were aware and had good reflexes, you could actually break the combos right at the highest level of the game. That actually got a little bit out of hand. The combos got really short because of it, but in an attack fighter, you want to still have long combos and feel like you’re doing a lot. So what we’ve done is just put those break points when you call in your active assist to break the combo.”
Speaking of combos, Invincible VS is meant to be a joy to play, even if you aren’t as skilled with fighting games. Players will have an option to enable the ability to do a combo by just hitting one button repeatedly, which will perform a special, a super, and even a tag to bring in another teammate.
There will also be an Overkill system in Invincible VS, which, as Parbhoo puts it, means “you are literally going to hit a superhero so hard that you’re probably going to knock off a limb or two. That’s just the way it goes in invincible.”
Fans can also rest easy knowing series creator Robert Kirkman is involved in this project, from an artistic perspective and as “the one who kind of put this world together, we value his opinion big time.”
“We don’t want this to feel detached from the source material,” Eder said. “If anything, I think there’s a lot we can kind of use from his knowledge and find ways to mix it up. We don’t want to just kind retread old ground like, ‘Hey, we did this in the show, let’s do this one-to-one in the game!’ I think that can get a little bit boring. Instead, we’re always looking at ways to elevate it. And Robert is a very core part of that conversation, because who knows these characters better than him and Ryan Ottley and Corey Walker and the other creators?”
Invincible VS will be out in 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. For more, check out all the other biggest moments from both IGN Live and the Xbox Games Showcase.
Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.
