Injustice Characters: How To Play Solomon Grundy

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.

Speed has always been a major problem in fighting games, and no one has really found a way around it in a 2D fighting game.  Solomon Grundy suffers from this fact.  He is fun to play as, but he will never be good.  He can do well against other slow characters and can easily punish people who don’t really know how to play the game.  When playing against even a decent player, however, you will quickly see just how flawed Grundy is.  His attacks carry too many recovery frames as well as start up frames.  Sure, he does good damage, but against faster characters all of that becomes useless when he blocks an attack and then the enemy attacks again before he can do anything.  His range is also much shorter than it should be.  Grundy relies on grabs, which means he needs the opponent to be pretty much adjacent to him and they cannot jump.  He also doesn’t really have grab setups.  The character I site is Astaroth from SoulCalibur.  He also uses grabs, but he has attacks that set them up.  Grundy doesn’t have anything like that because almost all of his attacks cause a lot of knockback, making it hard to follow up with a grab or any other kind of combo really, meaning that all you can do is time it right or attempt to put armor on your grab.  Another point is that there seems to be characters made to counter Grundy.  Superman has a ton of ranged attacks as well as the ability to ignore armor.  Doomsday has the ability to not be grabbed.  All that aside, if you still want to play Grundy…

Grundy does have a naturally armored attack, Walking Corpse, which is his best move.  It has good range, is a grab, and does good damage.  It does have two major drawbacks though, which is that you cannot hit aerial opponents with it, and that it sets you up perfectly to get hit by the enemy’s super move.  When playing as Grundy, you have to play defensively, but the opponent has to come to you.  Against characters with a lot of ranged attacks, Grundy is pretty much useless.  He is too slow to really go on the offensive, and he doesn’t have enough range to avoid being punished if his attacks are blocked.  He also gets knocked down just as easily as faster characters, meaning it is that much harder to recover.

When at range, Grundy’s only option is ??Y(On Xbox).  This move is very limited though.  It has a ton of start up frames, and it targets the enemy’s current location.  If they move, it will miss.  Also, it cannot hit aerial opponents.  People who jump a lot will almost always beat Grundy, no matter how good you are with him, no matter how well you know your combos.  The only thing you can do against jumping opponents is ??X (On Xbox) which will grab an opponent out of the air.  It doesn’t do all that much damage though.  Grundy players need to be able to effectively block in order to be decent.  By using his ability to decrease damage shaving, a Grundy player can win by waiting for the opponent to make mistakes if they are incredibly good at blocking.

If you are not godlike at blocking attacks, then I would recommend you look for another character.  Honestly, if you can block that well, why are you looking at such a slow character anyway?  If you still wish to use Grundy and can’t block all that well, just try and hit the opponent with your B attack and learn how to do the combos present within it.  Use walking corpse to inflict damage.  Avoid most of his regular attacks, since they’re slow, usually lack range, and have too many recovery frames to be of use.  You might end up being decent with him.

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