Skybound Entertainment and its Quarter Up game studio have about five weeks to go before the April 30 launch of Invincible VS.
The 3v3 fighting game is based on Skybound founder and The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman‘s Invincible comic book and TV show franchise, which has risen to be the No. 1 show on Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming show service.
The game is a big bet from Skybound that, even as a relative latecomer, it can make a mark in fighting games with a brand new internal game studio in Quarter Up and still break into the ultra-competitive fighting game genre with a new intellectual property, albeit one made famous by Kirkman, who is trying to create a kind of factory for oustanding IP to follow up on the success of The Walking Dead.
The advantage this new IP for gamers is that it’s already extremely popular because of the comic history and the Prime Video show. And it’s got an emotional story about a father-son duel, where the father, the ostensibly good Omni-Man, is part of an expanding empire that wants to conquer the planet and the other, his son Mark, wants to protect it.
Over the weekend, Skybound announced at the Evo Awards — the big show for the fighting game community — with several new reveals including Conquest as the 18th playable fighter in the game’s launch line-up. Skybound also revealed more open beta info, and initial downloadable content (DLC) character details.
Invincible VS’ 2026 Evo Awards highlights
Conquest joins the Invincible VS launch line-up, completing the 18-character starting roster. New Gameplay Trailer, originally revealed on-stage at the Evo Awards HERE.
The fighting game community learned of Conquest’s addition in person at Evo on Saturday, as a towering statue of him slowly emerged from 3,500 pounds of thawing ice and blood.
The open beta runs on consoles from April 9 to April 11, with (newly announced) three modes available to beta participants and a bonus Omni-Man skin for all participants.
Quarter Up also revealed the first two DLC characters, Universa and the Immortal, will arrive in summer 2026.
Conquest joins the fight
Conquest isn’t just a warning – he’s the end of the conversation. In classic Invincible fashion, Conquest’s reveal at the Evo Awards was a big one. A towering 6’8” statue of Conquest thawed from within 3,500 pounds of frozen ice and blood as fans witnessed the spectacle on-site and during a global livestream. The more fans that gathered to watch, the quicker Conquest was freed.
At the Evo Awards, Skybound Entertainment’s first in-house game development studio, Quarter Up, announced Conquest as the newest playable fighter in its upcoming 3v3 tag fighting game, Invincible VS, set in the award-winning Invincible universe.
By far the most ruthless and cruel member of the Viltrumites, Conquest gets a genuine thrill from causing mass pain and destruction. With no interest in duty, ceremony or politics, he meets every challenge with brutal violence, unfazed by the thought of collateral damage or taking innocent lives.
Conquest is known as the “nuclear option,” deployed only when the Empire needs a planet subdued in the most sadistic and merciless way possible. Yet that same savage, over-the-top brutality leaves him despised by his own kind – revealing a loneliness at his core.
In Invincible VS, Conquest is a devastating and unyielding “Striker.” Capable of applying immense pressure, and overpowering his opponents with powerful strikes, strategic counter projectiles, and a charging punch which builds speed and gains super armor as it travels. Time your armored abilities to blast through your opponents feeble attacks!
Conquest marks the final addition to the 18-character roster available at launch, joining a large lineup of fan-favorite characters like Mark Grayson (Invincible), Thula, Bulletproof, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, Omni-Man, Battle Beast, Cecil Stedman, Robot, Monster Girl, Anissa, Lucan, Powerplex, Dupli-Kate, Allen the Alien, Titan and Invincible VS’s first new original character, Ella Mental.
Gameplay preview
I saw the game at PAX West last year and also played it a bit at GDC. In an interview last year at PAX West, executive producer Mike Willette showed me the game and talked about how there were different flavors of arena like devastation arenas such as hometown invasion. When characters clash in these arenas, the fight cuases massive destruction and disruption to the environment. There are explosions or building collapses.
Then there are destination arenas, like the Himalayas and the moon. There’s a mechanic where, once per match, like when you’re pounding someone against a wall, you’ll send your opponent randomly to another destination in the world, Willette said.
That showcases some of the uniqueness of the game and its spectacles. Characters have unique lines of dialogue and multiple lines. Even if a match didn’t occur in the comics or the streaming show, the game’s lore shows it can happen in the game.
You can make moves like holding your opponent off in a blocking move. You can launch light (X button on the Xbox controller), medium (Y button) and heavy attacks (B button). You can launch a special attack with a couple of different control schemes. You have a neutral stance special, a down special and a towards special.
There’s also an auto combo system. If you match a light attack, it can go through a full comboo chain and execute a special move. If your meter is full, you can mash X and it will do a full combo sequence. As you get better, you can do a manual sequence of button pushes. You can escalate in poiwer to do chain combos. And after a chain combo you can end it with a special.
“There’s a lot of flexibility,” Willette said.
You also have to learn how to “tag” your assist characters, kind of like tagging out in a wrestling match and bringing in another fighter. Mortal Kombat One had a Kameo sysetm where you could bring in another character for a quick assist, Willette said.
With Invincible VS, you can call in your secondary character for an assist with a left trigger or left bumper press. Or you can bring in the character via a “tag” and swap them in permanently. It’s good to do this when your enemy has launched a combo and you need to do something to break the combo. But there’s a timer on how often you can do this.
To do a super move, you hold down the right trigger and press A and B together. That releases an ultimate move that costs yuou three bars of your super meter. The ultimate move can only be done on the ground, but specials and supers can be done in the air. They’re the most damaging and most brutal attacks.
Invincible VS is a bloody game. You’ll see there are different types of blood that form on the characters too. There’s offensive blood and defensive blood. And you can get a battle fatigue blood as well.
When your combo meter builds up and goes all the way full, you can knock an opponent out of a combo or do meter burn moves. You can do a counterattack using a tagged character, hitting the Y and B buttons at the same time, and derail a combo attack.
If you’re executing an arena shift, then you can lock the other player out from doing something for 10 seconds and regain your boost resource. That allows you to do special attacks during the shift. There’s real risk/reward to these kinds of moves, depending on what your opponent does.
Origins
Willette was the lead producer on Killer Instinct, a game developed by Double Helix Games and published by Microsoft. Willette, who serves as the announcer in the game, voiced Killer Instinct characters. He saw the opportunity to evolve fighting games with new ideas related to attacks, battles, defense and counter play.
Willette was the first employee at Skybound’s Quarter Up internal game studio, starting in February 2023. Dave Hall, the game director at Quarter Up, was the lead combat designer on Killer Instinct. Don Waters is the animation director on this game, and the network engineer who did the Net code on Killer Instinct is also the lead network engineer.
“We have a lot of our roots that came from those days, but we’ve also brought in a lot of brand new ideas. And there’s all these concepts with counter play and things that that we really liked when we were creating Killer Instinct,” Willette said. “We wanted to take those learnings and add more into what we’re presenting here. When I was first presented the opportunity to pitch for a game to Skybound, we chose Invincible because we were such fans of the comics and the show,” Willette said.
“There hasn’t been a really good tag fighting game since Dragon Ball FighterZ, and even before that, it’s was Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom. I always love the hype that these games bring, the creativity that they bring. And we wanted to do our version. We wanted our version to be like very brutal and violent because it’s evocative. It’s not violence for violence sake. And we’re not looking to be grotesque, but we’re here to celebrate and be authentic to what Invincible is,” Willette said.
He added, “These are superhumans that are fighting and clashing. This is what happens when they do that. That’s the stakes of fighting in this world. The show is an elevation of the comics, and we wanted to be an elevation of the show.”
Disclosure: I have family working at Skybound.