Apple / games / INJUSTICE: GODS AMONG US
REVIEW
Injustice quietly outlived every fighting game that copied it.
NetherRealm's 2013 mobile spin-off is still patching new characters thirteen years in. The card-collecting grind is older than the genre it helped invent.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Injustice: Gods Among Us
WARNER BROS.
OUR SCORE
7.4
APPLE
★ 4.8
PRICE
Free
Most free-to-play fighters from the early-2010s mobile gold rush were quietly shuttered years ago. Their servers went dark, their app pages went 404, their card collections evaporated into screenshots. Injustice: Gods Among Us, released by NetherRealm and Warner Bros. in April 2013, is still getting patches in 2026. The most recent update landed last month.
That alone makes it worth a look. The game’s design conventions are older than the genre it helped define — three-character tag teams, swipe-to-special combat, card-collection metagame — but the conventions held up well enough that Marvel Contest of Champions, Mortal Kombat Mobile (NetherRealm’s own follow-up), and a generation of imitators all built on the same chassis. Playing Injustice now is part nostalgia tour, part archaeology.
It’s not the best mobile fighter on the App Store anymore, and the energy-and-pack economy creaks audibly. But the combat still reads, the DC roster has expanded into a thirteen-year archive of card variants, and the developer hasn’t walked away. For a free 2013 release, that’s an unusual second act.
Most free-to-play fighters from this era were quietly shuttered years ago. Injustice kept getting cards.
FEATURES
Three-on-three tag fighting on a touchscreen, with swipes for combos and taps for jabs. Each match runs ninety seconds or so. You build a roster of DC characters as collectible cards — bronze, silver, gold — with stats, special moves, and team passives that stack when you field the right combination. Pull duplicates from packs and you fuse them upward for higher tiers.
Beyond the single-player campaign, there are timed online challenges that drop a specific character at the end, plus a head-to-head ladder against other players' AI-piloted teams. Energy gates how many matches you can run before waiting or paying, in the standard 2013 free-to-play shape.
The console fighter it shares a name with — the 2013 Warner Bros. release on PS3 and Xbox 360 — is a different game entirely. The mobile version uses the same characters, environments, and lore, but the mechanics are built from the ground up for one-handed phone play.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The combat reads cleanly on a small screen, which is the part most mobile fighters still get wrong. Swipe-based specials and the tag system make sense within a match or two, and the production values — character models, voice work, the destructible-environment finishers — punched well above the 2013 free-to-play average and have aged better than expected.
The roster is the real reason it's still here. Thirteen years of updates means hundreds of card variants spanning every DC arc, Injustice 2 tie-ins, movie cross-promotions, and seasonal alts. If you want a specific Batman or a specific Joker, the odds are NetherRealm has shipped that card at some point.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The economy is from a different era and feels it. Energy timers, pack RNG, and a real-money currency layered on top of an in-game currency layered on top of character-shard drops add up to the gacha math that most current fighters have moved past. Marvel Contest of Champions iterated on this template for years; Injustice mostly didn't.
Server-side progress is tied to a WB Games account, and players who've stopped playing for a while routinely report rosters showing up incomplete on return. The interface still carries the visual conventions of a 2013 mobile game — small tap targets, layered modal menus, a tutorial that assumes you've never seen a card game before. New players land in a deep meta with no easy ramp.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you remember playing this on an iPhone 5 and want to see what thirteen years of patches did to it, or if you're a DC fan willing to absorb the gacha grind for the card art alone. Skip it if you're looking for a current-generation mobile fighter — Marvel Contest of Champions and its descendants run that playbook better now. What's remarkable is that the game is still here at all.