One of the 2025 Xbox Showcase's most shocking reveals was Invincible VS, a new three-on-three tag fighter from Skybound and a new startup studio called Quarter Up Games. Don't let the "new startup" descriptor fool you, however; this is a team steeped in fighting game experience, as it was responsible for bringing back a cult classic to a legion of appreciative fans over a decade ago.
This time, Quarter Up and Skybound are set on breathing new life not into just a franchise, but a concept--Invincible VS invokes the highly-praised Marvel vs. Capcom style of 2D fighting games that use a tag-team system to swap between multiple characters, which is a tall task to try replicating. Based on our hands-on gameplay during a recent visit to Skybound in Los Angeles, it seems that Quarter Up is well on its way to answering the call.
In 2013, developer Double Helix brought Rare's Killer Instinct series back to the masses on Xbox One. The 2013 installment's gritty, impactful fighting system made it an instant fan favorite, but soon after it launched, the studio was snapped up by Amazon Games. Many of KI 2013's key developers went on to other projects, but Mike Willette--KI 2013 producer and the voice behind the iconic "c-c-c-combo breaker!" sound effect in the reboot--wasn't done with fighting games yet. He wanted to get the band back together.
"We felt like we had unfinished business," Willette told GameSpot on a recent Zoom call. "I still had that itch, so after working [as lead of the world design team] on New World [at Amazon], I reached out to a whole bunch of the oldheads and said, 'Look, I'm thinking about starting a studio. Would you guys be interested?' Immediately, a bunch of them were in. 'Yeah dude, I had so much fun. We love the people, we love the community. If you can make it happen, Mike, we'll show up.'"
Not long after, Willette found himself in the offices of Skybound, creators of the dark and gritty Invincible superhero franchise. "Skybound asks me, 'Mike, what game would you want to build here?' and I immediately said, 'I want to build an Invincible fighting game, and I'll build a tag fighting game,'" Willette recalled. "I was a huge fan of the show and the comics, and there's just so much rich material there. It's violent. It's brutal. It has the stakes of what happens with superheroes. I just connected with them on such a level that I said, 'This is it, this is what I want to do.'"
Making a three-on-three tag fighter was a no-brainer for the team, as Invincible's pantheon of superheroes, according to Willette, lends itself perfectly to that style of fighting game. Tag battle fighting games are hype. They're incredible," Willette said. "The amount of creativity, the combo systems, the different archetypes that let you build your own team, instead of just using a single character... There hadn't been a real big game since Dragon Ball FighterZ, either, so we carried over from our days in KI, plus all the learnings from the past 10 years, and that's the genesis of Quarter Up."
Invincible VS
Gallery
Invincible VS employs a simplified version of Marvel vs. Capcom 3's four-button control scheme for attacks: There are four attack buttons--light, medium, heavy, and special--and each has multiple special attacks that are used depending on which direction you move the left thumbstick, a la Super Smash Bros. Tapping the light attack multiple times also offers an auto-combo that will chain into a super move, should the aggressor have the meter to use it.
Thankfully, the team has balanced that simplified control scheme with a system that offers plenty of depth and advanced tactics to discover. Those worried about players mashing the combo button over and over again, for example, can take solace in the return of one of Killer Instinct's defining features: the combo meter, which will force a player to drop a combo if they use the same move too often.
Core fighting mechanics resemble those from other fighting games: Heroic Boost adds extra power or hits to special attacks similar to EX moves in Street Fighter, super meters allow for more powerful moves as you charge them up by attacking and blocking, and so on. Some are adapted in new and interesting ways, however: "snapback"--moves that force an opponent to swap characters--can also blast an opponent into an entirely different stage in Invincible VS. In doing so, the character getting knocked into a new stage will lose access to their assist characters for a brief moment--because, from a storytelling perspective, those characters have to "catch up," while the offensive team is ready to go.
Incorporating the Invincible franchise into this format, meanwhile, has been incredibly easy for Willette and his team--easier than his previous projects, in fact.
"Compared to Killer Instinct's historical files, I have a lot more access with this property," Willette explained. "The problem when we worked on KI was that all of the previous developers were gone; we did have [Xbox partner creative director] Ken Lobb, and I could always go to Ken, but here I can go right to the well, and it's a deep well."
This comes through in the pre-fight character intros, where every character pairing in the game will have unique dialogue with every other character--even if they've never interacted in official Invincible media.
"We've got access to decades worth of comic references, access to the show team," Willette said, "and we're always spitballing ideas back and forth with each other. It's very cool to work here."
That authenticity also bears a more grisly side through Invincible VS' blood-and-gore factor, a trait not normally associated with tag fighters like this. The most obvious implementation of this is in Overkills, where certain special and super moves will decapitate, dismember, or even detonate an opponent's body into pieces if used as the final hit.
Willette says this level of violence was necessary to convey what Invincible has always been about, but there is a limit.
"Our goal is to be brutal, but not hyper-grotesque for shock value," he explained. "We want to show the sheer brutality of these superheroes fighting, like the ground getting torn up or costumes getting ripped and splattered with blood. If you did a killing blow, it's really important for us, especially to be authentic to the [intellectual property]."
Willette also reveals that the team has put a unique spin on the battle damage concept through "offensive" and "defensive" versions of it. If one character has a big lead over another, the leading character will still have blood spots on their costumes or fists caked in red--it's just the other character's blood rather than their own.
"We are really conscious of how these things would affect both fighters," Willette said. "If a character is at low health, for another example, their idle animation will be different to show how tired they are. They're saying, 'All right, I'm messed up, but I'll keep going.' We really wanted to have those as part of the storytelling of the fight action."
The team at Quarter Up Games wants Invincible VS to appeal to as many players as possible, and it hopes to achieve it through one simple approach: Make each player feel like an absolute badass.
"When you pick up that game pad for the first time and you can just mash and you feel awesome, that's great. That means you're going to stick around longer," Willette said. "If you've never played a fighting game before, I'd love for this to be your first fighting game. And if lapsed, we'd love for you to come back for this because we love fighting games. We want to make you fans.
"This is a love letter from us saying, 'Yeah, we love Invincible, we love fighting games and we want you to come play.'"
Invincible VS is set for launch in 2026 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
Source
This time, Quarter Up and Skybound are set on breathing new life not into just a franchise, but a concept--Invincible VS invokes the highly-praised Marvel vs. Capcom style of 2D fighting games that use a tag-team system to swap between multiple characters, which is a tall task to try replicating. Based on our hands-on gameplay during a recent visit to Skybound in Los Angeles, it seems that Quarter Up is well on its way to answering the call.
A Killer origin story
In 2013, developer Double Helix brought Rare's Killer Instinct series back to the masses on Xbox One. The 2013 installment's gritty, impactful fighting system made it an instant fan favorite, but soon after it launched, the studio was snapped up by Amazon Games. Many of KI 2013's key developers went on to other projects, but Mike Willette--KI 2013 producer and the voice behind the iconic "c-c-c-combo breaker!" sound effect in the reboot--wasn't done with fighting games yet. He wanted to get the band back together.
"We felt like we had unfinished business," Willette told GameSpot on a recent Zoom call. "I still had that itch, so after working [as lead of the world design team] on New World [at Amazon], I reached out to a whole bunch of the oldheads and said, 'Look, I'm thinking about starting a studio. Would you guys be interested?' Immediately, a bunch of them were in. 'Yeah dude, I had so much fun. We love the people, we love the community. If you can make it happen, Mike, we'll show up.'"
Not long after, Willette found himself in the offices of Skybound, creators of the dark and gritty Invincible superhero franchise. "Skybound asks me, 'Mike, what game would you want to build here?' and I immediately said, 'I want to build an Invincible fighting game, and I'll build a tag fighting game,'" Willette recalled. "I was a huge fan of the show and the comics, and there's just so much rich material there. It's violent. It's brutal. It has the stakes of what happens with superheroes. I just connected with them on such a level that I said, 'This is it, this is what I want to do.'"
Making a three-on-three tag fighter was a no-brainer for the team, as Invincible's pantheon of superheroes, according to Willette, lends itself perfectly to that style of fighting game. Tag battle fighting games are hype. They're incredible," Willette said. "The amount of creativity, the combo systems, the different archetypes that let you build your own team, instead of just using a single character... There hadn't been a real big game since Dragon Ball FighterZ, either, so we carried over from our days in KI, plus all the learnings from the past 10 years, and that's the genesis of Quarter Up."
Invincible VS
Gallery
Becoming Invincible
Invincible VS employs a simplified version of Marvel vs. Capcom 3's four-button control scheme for attacks: There are four attack buttons--light, medium, heavy, and special--and each has multiple special attacks that are used depending on which direction you move the left thumbstick, a la Super Smash Bros. Tapping the light attack multiple times also offers an auto-combo that will chain into a super move, should the aggressor have the meter to use it.
Thankfully, the team has balanced that simplified control scheme with a system that offers plenty of depth and advanced tactics to discover. Those worried about players mashing the combo button over and over again, for example, can take solace in the return of one of Killer Instinct's defining features: the combo meter, which will force a player to drop a combo if they use the same move too often.
Core fighting mechanics resemble those from other fighting games: Heroic Boost adds extra power or hits to special attacks similar to EX moves in Street Fighter, super meters allow for more powerful moves as you charge them up by attacking and blocking, and so on. Some are adapted in new and interesting ways, however: "snapback"--moves that force an opponent to swap characters--can also blast an opponent into an entirely different stage in Invincible VS. In doing so, the character getting knocked into a new stage will lose access to their assist characters for a brief moment--because, from a storytelling perspective, those characters have to "catch up," while the offensive team is ready to go.
Incorporating the Invincible franchise into this format, meanwhile, has been incredibly easy for Willette and his team--easier than his previous projects, in fact.
"Compared to Killer Instinct's historical files, I have a lot more access with this property," Willette explained. "The problem when we worked on KI was that all of the previous developers were gone; we did have [Xbox partner creative director] Ken Lobb, and I could always go to Ken, but here I can go right to the well, and it's a deep well."
This comes through in the pre-fight character intros, where every character pairing in the game will have unique dialogue with every other character--even if they've never interacted in official Invincible media.
"We've got access to decades worth of comic references, access to the show team," Willette said, "and we're always spitballing ideas back and forth with each other. It's very cool to work here."
Battle scars
That authenticity also bears a more grisly side through Invincible VS' blood-and-gore factor, a trait not normally associated with tag fighters like this. The most obvious implementation of this is in Overkills, where certain special and super moves will decapitate, dismember, or even detonate an opponent's body into pieces if used as the final hit.
Willette says this level of violence was necessary to convey what Invincible has always been about, but there is a limit.
"Our goal is to be brutal, but not hyper-grotesque for shock value," he explained. "We want to show the sheer brutality of these superheroes fighting, like the ground getting torn up or costumes getting ripped and splattered with blood. If you did a killing blow, it's really important for us, especially to be authentic to the [intellectual property]."
Willette also reveals that the team has put a unique spin on the battle damage concept through "offensive" and "defensive" versions of it. If one character has a big lead over another, the leading character will still have blood spots on their costumes or fists caked in red--it's just the other character's blood rather than their own.
"We are really conscious of how these things would affect both fighters," Willette said. "If a character is at low health, for another example, their idle animation will be different to show how tired they are. They're saying, 'All right, I'm messed up, but I'll keep going.' We really wanted to have those as part of the storytelling of the fight action."
The team at Quarter Up Games wants Invincible VS to appeal to as many players as possible, and it hopes to achieve it through one simple approach: Make each player feel like an absolute badass.
"When you pick up that game pad for the first time and you can just mash and you feel awesome, that's great. That means you're going to stick around longer," Willette said. "If you've never played a fighting game before, I'd love for this to be your first fighting game. And if lapsed, we'd love for you to come back for this because we love fighting games. We want to make you fans.
"This is a love letter from us saying, 'Yeah, we love Invincible, we love fighting games and we want you to come play.'"
Invincible VS is set for launch in 2026 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
Source