Invincible VS adds Angstrom Levy as its third DLC fighter

Angstrom Levy is joining Invincible VS on 13 October, the game's third downloadable fighter and its twenty-first playable character. The announcement came on Xbox Wire from Mike Willette, executive producer on Invincible VS, and the post carrying it is headlined around an open beta that begins the same day.

A fighter built on portals

Angstrom is a zoning character, which in a fighting game means he wants to control space rather than close it. His portals can be used to attack, to escape, to move around the arena or to set traps, and they can be placed deliberately so that an opponent walks into something unpleasant. On top of that he summons orbs he can command, and the two systems interact: portals redirect what goes through them, orbs add pressure, and the combinations are left for players to find.

Quarter Up, the studio behind the game, frames him as a character who rewards experimentation. The design intent is that somebody who spends time working out how portals and orbs talk to each other ends up making opponents unsure where it is safe to stand, which is a different kind of pressure from the rushdown most of the roster applies.

Who Angstrom Levy is

In the fiction Angstrom began as a brilliant human who could travel between dimensions. An accident left him with a disfigured, oversized brain and the memories of his alternate selves, and the inability to separate his own life from theirs broke his mind. He holds Invincible responsible for what happened to him. That grudge is the reason his kit leans on multiversal travel rather than brute force, and it is why the portals are the centre of everything he does.

Where he fits

Invincible VS is a three-on-three tag fighter, so a character who manipulates space is more than a solo problem. Teammates and assists already give players a lot to think about; adding portals and orbs to that mix opens up team strategies rather than just new combos. Angstrom arrives as part of Season 2, and anyone at Evo France this month gets to try him before release.

The game is out now on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, priced at $49.99. It is the debut release from Quarter Up, the first in-house studio at Skybound, staffed by former members of the core team behind Killer Instinct, the 2013 fighting game.

Our opinion

Fighting games live or die on whether a new character changes how the match feels rather than how it looks, and a trap-and-zoning kit is the sort of thing that either becomes a nightmare to fight or an afterthought nobody picks. Portals have an obvious failure mode, too: if they are strong they make movement meaningless, and if they are weak the character is a gimmick with a grudge. What makes Angstrom a better bet than most DLC additions is that the design is tied to the fiction rather than bolted onto it. A man who cannot tell his own memories from his variants' is a natural fit for a character who is never quite where he appears to be, and Quarter Up has built the fighting style around that idea instead of around a moveset list. Whether it lands is a question for the players picking him up at Evo France.