Invincible VS director wants players to feel like "a f**king superhero," so expect matches that are a "knock-down, drag-out fight until the death"

I've been looking forward to Invincible VS, the upcoming 3v3 tag fighter from developer Quarter Up, pretty much since it was first announced. I'm a stalwart fan of the Invincible animated series and have read all of the comics; a fighting game just makes sense. And if Invincible VS game director Dave Hall is to be believed, the game is going to deliver exactly what I want.

"We wanted to feel like a superhero – and a fucking superhero, is what we kept saying, because this is Invincible," Hall tells me at GDC 2026 when I ask if there was some sort of guiding light to developing the fighting game. "When they fight, the world destroys around them. If you look at when we're fighting, the arenas are actually destroying themselves in the background. As you're doing all these incredible hits, your outfit is just getting torn apart. You got blood dripping down your face. You go into your fatigued stance. Everything starts happening in this game."

Not so invincible after all

"This is a knock-down, drag-out fight until the death, is how we view it," he continues. "And it's just fun for us. We're just like, 'OK, everything needs to get destroyed. This is gonna happen.' Mechanics aside, it was just like the visuals of actually watching the fight progress [that] was really important for us."

My butt is handed to me while playing against Hall and then GamesRadar+ senior producer James Daly. I offer up the meager excuse that I've not really done tag fighters; my bread and butter growing up were games like Tekken 3. Marvel vs. who? Even so, I'm having a good time – which is exactly as it should be, according to Hall.

"If you like action games, if you like fun, we're gonna have our modes and different things to play," he says. "You don't have to play competitively. And so it's just fun to get in there and press buttons and just see the destruction happening, the characters, all their quips that they're doing throughout the whole fight. When they're talking, you get their personality."

Allen The Alien Gameplay Trailer | Open Beta Reveal - YouTube

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In fact, Hall adds that you don't actually need to know anything about Invincible. "It's very honorific, and it's also fun to just press buttons," he says. "And then if you want to go take it further and you want to start to become competitive, that's when you can keep pushing yourself a little further. But that's not for everybody, so there's going to be a lot of single-player content for us to have fun with in this too."

For now, however, the team isn't elaborating on what exactly will be in this single-player content beyond the fact that it exists. What we do know is there will be 18 playable characters at launch with 10 of those available during the open beta that starts on April 9: Mark Grayson (Invincible), Atom Eve, Bulletproof, Thula, Rex Splode, Battle Beast, Omni Man, Robot, Monster Girl, and Allen the Alien. But narrowing the roster down was no easy feat.

"There was a lot of discussion on this," Hall admits when I ask how they whittled the giant Invincible cast to the main roster. "It's like, who are fan-favorites, who's been in the show already, and who do we think is going to be really fun also? It took a while to get to this, the core 18 that we're going to have out, and I think we've made a lot of really good choices."

With the release of Invincible VS just over a month away on April 30, and the open beta even sooner, there's not long to wait for people to find out for themselves just how good the choices are.

Invincible VS is set to release for the PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on April 30, 2026. While you wait, be sure to check out our ranking of the best fighting games of all time.