Injustice 2 notes

Injustice 2 tickles the exact spot I want tickled with this type of game, and WHY MARVEL WHY CAN'T YOU MAKE ONE JUST LIKE IT? But I digress.

I finished the campaign on medium in around 5 hours I'd estimate. It's really quick, but you're basically watching a 5-hour movie where you're personally responsible for winning all the fights, so 5 hours is a nice, merciful runtime here.

Injustice 2 feels like such a clean fighter. My experience in the genre is pretty limited to MK, Injustice and Smash Bros, with MK tending to be my favorite, but this game feels even cleaner than MK11. It's so nice that I'm really tempted to keep playing it, dive into the towers and grind for a while, but that's not the exercise as we know.

The story here manages to excite me even more than the actual DCEU, just as it did in the first one. It's not perfect. The Act 2 pivot where Batman releases Superman (right after Blue Beetle and Firestorm just worked so hard to keep Wonder Woman and Black Adam from doing so) was extremely annoying, but I suppose it needed to happen.

A game can usually get away with a little more goofiness, and that's certainly true here. The one-liners and whacko characters abound, but otherwise, this is a mostly believable storyline with high stakes. I like that the game found a way to let us play as the villains on the side of good but still keep them villains in the end (I guess, depending on your point of view. Leave a comment!).

I'm not a huge fan of the fighting game thing where the way they amp up the final boss difficulty is just by doubling damage output, but I'm not sure what a better solution would be. Sucks to lose to a single 3-hit combo that does 50% of your bar or something. I found the best way to beat Braniac, at least on medium difficulty, was to be extremely aggressive, always having a 3-button combo unloading as he's getting up from the last one.

I wonder what the Superman ending looks like (but not enough to go back and replay the whole thing). The Batman ending was pretty straightforward, gotta put these guys back behind bars. I assume that's the canon ending. Hope we find out in Injustice 3.

Favorite fighter: Green Arrow.