Injustice Character Tips: Shazam

Injustice was released in April 2013.  It is a 2D fighting game based off of the DC comic book universe.  Most people will recognize Batman and others from his story such as the Joker and Bane.  There are a lot of more obscure characters though such as Solomon Grundy, Deathstroke, and Shazam for the DC fans.

Injustice has a lot of good points to it.  The combat is a lot of fun and fast paced.  The characters are pretty diverse and interesting.  The graphics are very good and the menus are easily navigable.  The single player experience is also pretty good.  The storyline is interesting and the campaign has you play as a large number of different characters, allowing you to experiment with each one while slowly getting harder.  Gameplay itself is rewarding and precision button inputs are very important, resulting in ??? being a very difficult input.  The stage transitions are a lot of fun to watch and do good damage but are sufficiently hard enough to perform that they aren’t a drawback to the actual fighting.

Shazam is certainly one of the lamest characters I’ve ever seen.  He’s kind of like Thor except he’s a little kid, which you will find out when you see his entrance at the beginning of the fight.  It is incredibly lame.  That aside,I thought he was going to be a ton of fun to play when I used him in practice because of his special move (B on the Xbox) which charges his fists with lightning, causing his punches to do massive damage.  Unfortunately, his attacks are so short range that it’s hard to hit the opponent.  The two moves that really set up the combos are difficult to pull off and you don’t have long before your fists lose their charge.

I found that Shazam is more frustrating than he is lame.  You charge your fists and you’re ready to do big damage but you end up with nothing.  This will happen over and over again.

Shazam’s X,X,Y combo does the most damage.  It is a good follow up to meter burning his ??X, which can be set up with ?A.  ???X is a grab that can be very effective if you can pull it off.  The game does not like this input though, and you will have to master it to use it effectively.  By meter burning it, you can then jump and hit the opponent with A to bounce them and then hit them with X,X,Y.  If you charged your fists beforehand, this will do massive damage.

Other than his charged fists though, Shazam isn’t that great.  He has a charge attack that can be meter burned for extra damage, and he can throw a lightning bolt that can be meter burned to turn it into a mid attack and cause extra damage.  Other than that, his moves have really short range, and don’t do much damage.  He isn’t as fast as you first believe him to be and once you realize that pretty much every other character has a longer reach than him, you will like him less.  Unfortunately, fighting against someone isn’t like fighting the training dummy.

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