Breaking Why I Love Injustice 2's Story Mode

Who would win in a fight? Comics writers know this is what fans argue about, endlessly, and feed those arguments with crossovers and stories like Batman vs. Superman. Usually it's naff stuff where characters just biff each other for a bit and then abruptly form a getalong gang as if they weren't battering each others' faces in just five minutes ago.

In Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it's brilliant. This week, Jody appreciates Injustice 2's super cast.

The developers of Mortal Kombat obviously weren't going to do anything so weaksauce. In the Injustice games, Superman's gone full evil and started a tyrannical regime straight-up called The Regime, which Batman leads a resistance against. The inciting incident of the whole storyline kills off Lois Lane and the Joker, and it gets wilder from there. By the time of Injustice 2, Superman has been imprisoned for his crimes, Clock King's had his daft head blown up, Green Arrow's been killed and replaced by a version of himself from a dimension where his wife died instead, and Gorilla Grodd's taken over Gorilla City in a bloody coup. Take that, Zack Snyder.

All that stuff is only relevant in story mode, of course, and story modes aren't normally the reason people play fighting games—excepting Tekken's agreeably insane one, with people throwing their family members off cliffs or into volcanos, hurling motorbikes at helicopters, and fighting bears. Usually though, fighting games struggle to tell a coherent story because they've got so many characters to work with. But comic books have been dealing with that problem for decades, and Injustice 2 simply steals the format. In the DC Universe, everyone already has a reason to fight everyone.

Weirdly, the plot's a lot like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Superman's a villain, Harley Quinn's a hero, and Brainiac's the final boss. Only in this version of events, Kevin Conroy's Batman is also on the side of the angels—well, if Harley and Catwoman count as angels—and you only have to defeat Brainiac once instead of over and over again until Warner Bros runs out of seasonal content to sell you.

The performances are much better than they need to be, thanks to facial animation that was well ahead of its time and voice acting by the likes of Jeffrey Combs from Re-Animator as Brainiac, Robert Englund from Nightmare on Elm Street as Scarecrow, Alan Tudyk from Firefly as Green Arrow, and Laura Bailey from Critic

Source: PC Gamer