5 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. A Featured Win badge from Valve itself. A $49.99 asking price that puts it alongside AAA heavyweights. And a 65% positive user rating — the Steam equivalent of a shrug.

That’s the paradox of Invincible VS, the 3v3 tag fighting game from developer Quarter Up and publisher Skybound Games. It launched April 30 with every commercial wind at its back — a red-hot IP, a prominent storefront feature, and a developer pedigree that includes the core team behind 2013’s Killer Instinct reboot. The audience showed up. They’re just not all convinced they got their money’s worth.

The Numbers Tell Two Stories

Let’s start with the split. As of May 1, Invincible VS sits at “Mixed” on Steam with 501 user reviews — 324 positive, 177 negative. That’s a 65% approval rating. On the critical side, the picture is notably brighter: a 76 metascore on Metacritic from 33 reviews, and a 79 average on OpenCritic. Critics generally like it. Users are split.

The game is also hovering around 6,048 concurrent players on Steam, which landed it at #5 on the Top Sellers chart. That chart position reflects revenue, not player count — meaning the $49.99 price point is doing heavy lifting. A $10 indie game would need roughly five times the sales volume to chart at the same position. The IP is clearly moving units. Whether those buyers are staying is a different question.

What’s Working

The professional reviews converge on a few clear strengths. The fighting system — a 3v3 tag structure with combo-breaking mind games borrowed from Killer Instinct’s DNA — gets consistent praise for being accessible to newcomers while offering depth for competitive players. Quarter Up’s roster of 18 fighters, despite heavy Viltrumite representation, manages varied playstyles: grapplers, zoners, rushdown characters, and wildcards like Cecil, who teleports across the screen with an arsenal of weapons and zombie cyborgs.

The rollback netcode gets universal applause. IGN called it “stellar” without caveats. In a genre where bad netcode can tank a game’s competitive future before it starts, that matters.

Polygon’s review summed up the core tension well: “The story mode is fighting for the sake of fighting — but that fighting is damn good.”

What’s Not

The complaints, both from critics and users, cluster around the same three problems: the story mode is too short, the overall package is thin, and some mechanics feel frustrating in practice.

The story mode runs roughly one hour — short even by fighting game standards. IGN described it as feeling “like a filler episode of the actual show that was never aired,” and noted it ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger with no real conclusion. Polygon was more blunt: “There are no emotional beats or character development in Invincible VS’s story.”

Beyond story, the package is bare. No combo trials. No character guides. No replay search for studying other players. The arcade mode offers brief character endings, but fighting the CPU in a game built around conditioning and baiting human opponents feels hollow. One Metacritic review called it “barebones in enough areas to make it feel like a big missed chance for meaningful expansion of the IP.”

Mechanically, the Assist Break system drew particular heat from IGN. Players can break out of combos at will by spending meter, at the cost of 50% of a sidelined character’s max health. In theory, the trade-off punishes overuse. In practice, against players who don’t understand the cost, it drags matches out and makes the game feel punishing for the wrong reasons.

The IP Premium

Here’s the uncomfortable question: if you stripped the Invincible license off this game — replaced Mark Grayson, Omni-Man, and Atom Eve with generic fighters — would it be a Top 5 seller at $49.99?

Probably not. The game launched into a crowded fighting game landscape alongside 2XKO and ahead of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. It has real mechanical merit and strong netcode, but it also has a one-hour story, limited single-player content, and a 65% user rating. The Invincible brand — bolstered by Amazon’s hit animated series, with voice actors reprising their roles and series creator Robert Kirkman involved in development — is doing significant heavy lifting.

That’s not a criticism of the game itself, which most critics agree is a solid fighter. It’s a recognition that at $49.99, players are paying a premium, and a significant portion of them feel shortchanged by what’s on offer. The Mixed rating isn’t a disaster — it’s a referendum. The IP opened the door. The game didn’t always close it.

Sources