Despite the name being somewhat of a mouthful, Invincible Presents: Atom Eve is effectively just that: an Atom Eve-focused experience through the lens of Invincible, both the Prime Video animated series and the comic by Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley. Also, if you really want to get technical, the name is a reference to the original comics run anyway, so it's not entirely Skybound Entertainment and developer Terrible Posture Games' fault, but the ways in which the game has been formed out of what's come before is immediately clear because of it.
The premise, if you're entirely unfamiliar, is that you are Atom Eve, a teen superhero that's looking to balance her obligations of family and school with those of her crime fighting group, the Teen Team. It follows a loose adaptation of the plot of the comics, and the brief preview included several sections that directly lifted scenes or dialogue from the comic and show. It also leans into both visually, with the vibrant colors and panels of a motion comic, while including a lot of the smart decisions of the Prime Video adaptation when it comes to, for example, character design.
Guarding the Globe
Invincible Presents: Atom Eve was first announced during SDCC 2023
But at its most basic, mechanically speaking, Invincible Presents: Atom Eve is a visual novel with a veneer of turn-based role-playing. There are skills you can upgrade with perks, traits, and abilities along a three-spoked skill tree that can be used in and out of combat, with each clearly marked. While there are plenty of combat-related skills to grab from the iterative +4 to dodge to new moves, the vast majority of my time spent in a preview build of the second and third episode of Invincible Presents: Atom Eve was figuring out where Eve should spend her time, with whom, and her choices while doing so.
This varied wildly and seemingly included a number of tentpole scenes in addition to several that I could pick between in order to experience or not. For example, while Eve might always go home at the end of the day, whether she blows off some steam with her boyfriend Rex or applies for college isn't necessarily guaranteed. Between each major scene, the game's relatively small map introduced a couple points of interest until only the critical path remained, and each time there were plenty of places that I didn't explore before I had to move on.
But picking whether to hang out with Mark (aka Invincible, aka the new superhero in town) or someone else and other such choices make up only half of the game. Invincible Presents: Atom Eve's preview included several battles with a variety of enemies, which roughly follow individual turns with Eve able to dish out multiple moves depending on energy consumption. She can also save up energy in order to perform more powerful moves, though I never managed to unlock any particularly devastating ones.
Frankly, combat was exceedingly simple. Players can hover over enemies to see what they will be doing with their next turns in detail, and even the little markers that are shown without doing that largely give it away. In the preview, in addition to throwing punches and energy blasts, Eve had abilities to immobilize enemies (and prevent melee attacks) or I could basically stun them with energy flowers to make them more likely to miss ranged attacks, which meant I could often go whole turns with enemies doing much. Other than the one of the final battles in the preview, which overcame this simplicity by featuring several attackers as well as a secondary objective needing active intervention, there was no real sense of ever even potentially coming close to defeat.
Then again, this specific preview included roughly only a fifth of the full game. If combat gets more complex and convoluted from where I left off, the bones are there for it to be interesting. The mechanics of when to use energy and how, and on what moves against which enemies, could easily make for compelling choices. But it could just as easily be more of the same, leading to disappointment.
Taken on its own merits, the preview for Invincible Presents: Atom Eve is charming with colorful visuals that look ripped directly from the brightest, most vibrant comics. The artists clearly had a good time with it, and it really suits the source material. But the actual gameplay is only just fine with the potential to be more than that, which while not unexpected for a game that emphasizes from the start that it's a visual novel, is perhaps somewhat a shame. For longtime fans of Kirkman and Ottley's original work, however, it'll likely be enough that the art and dialogue are both solid and seem worthy of the name.
