I played a lot of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, back in the day. Not that it was a particularly remarkable game, but it featured a relatively deep game system that mixed top down combat with character updates and customised attacks in a way that, along with great atmosphere, made me stay. For a while anyway. Marvel Strike Force was based on the same basic idea and was very much a carbon copy, which I also spent some time with. The enforced frequent requests for me to trade micro gadgets for real money and the amount of pure grind it contained made me tired, but just like in the case of Galaxy of Heroes there were merits that could not be ignored.
Invincible: Guarding the Globe is a carbon copy Galaxy of Heroes and Strike Force, in every conceivable way. Ubisoft's management has put a small frenzied mini-team in charge of stealing every single element of these titles, but has forgotten to create any kind of identity or value of its own in terms of gameplay, which in this case is rather lacking. The set-up is simple. The Flaxan armies have invaded Earth and it's up to Mark Grayson and his superhero companions to clear the streets of this galactic rubbish.
You choose which characters you want to take into battle and what position in your line-up they should all be in, then you watch them 'do their job' automatically and simply hope they win. You can't fight by yourself using different button combinations, you can't customise your attacks like in Galaxy of Heroes, you can't play with friends like in Strike Force and you can't make your Invincible heroes link their attacks together to cause even more damage like in the Marvel game. Ubisoft has ditched everything that's good about the games they copied, and this of course has resulted in gameplay that not only offers next to zero interactivity, but is so monotonously pointless that it feels like the clocks have stopped.
Every battle is the same, or rather identical. The enemies are copied between battles and after several hours with Guarding the Globe, I can honestly say that I haven't reviewed something as grotesquely monotonous as this really is in quite a few years. The heroes do their thing while you watch, the story is contentlessly slack and is told in the form of still images plus text boxes, and the atmosphere breathes far too little of Invincible. It's not helped by the fact that Ubisoft has put in enough intrusive micro-headings that the game almost cracks. Every time you and your heroes lose a battle, a box pops up telling you that you need to upgrade your heroes further and when you run out of currency to buy these upgrades, you are automatically taken to the shop category where it is possible to spend thousands of dollars on money and jewellery, which is required to get past the next battle without lots of extra "grind" and backtracking. It is certainly possible to deploy your heroes in a series of smaller GDA missions and thereby, without even having to sit and watch the misery, pull in extra money to the wallet, but for those who want to get ahead, fight bosses and avoid hacking bright yellow clones in the thousands behind a hamburger kiosk, it is the micro purchases that are required, here.
In more ways than one, it is a shame that Ubisoft has chosen to use the surely costly Invincible licence in this way. The setup doesn't fit Invincible and its characters, the game mechanics are so automated that it never even feels like I'm participating as a player and the story is ridiculously thin and uninteresting. Instead, of course, they should have built a full-fledged big game a'la Marvel's Spider-Man, drenched in character, corruption, power play, evil, blood and intergalactic death. Mark Grayson and his super daddy deserved that.