2XKO Alpha Lab
While I've been somewhat looking forward to this game, now that I've actually gotten a chance to try it, I'm a lot more confident that'll enjoy it when it officially releases. From watching videos, I thought the game seemed similar to BBTAG and MVCI, but I tried to be skeptical and doubt my own assumptions, but after playing it, BBTAG and MVCI actually are totally the two most similar games I've played to this. Every now and then I hear the game is "actually most similar to Power Rangers Battle For The Grid", but I haven't played that, so I can't really speak on that. (I should play Battle For The Grid. It sounds fun.)
Attacks + Offensive Mechanics
General attacks and offensive options felt very fun to use. The assist mechanics can be used fairly frequently and are quite versatile. Ekko and Illaoi's 4T's both have great combo potential, and feel extremely satisfying to combo into.
I didn't quite get a hold of all my moves during the alpha, but I felt like I was getting a grasp of things fast enough. The assists in particular felt fairly intuitive for me to use. Special moves, just in general were pretty cool. I especially loved Ekko's teleports, but I also really appreciated that he has a solid kit even without them.
The combo system is pretty open, but to avoid going on a rant, I'll just say that there are definitely some hard restrictions.
I also didn't totally understand these restrictions. OTG's in particular didn't really seem to make any consistent sense to me. Still, there's tons and tons of fun to have with this game's combo system though.
I didn't really mind that none of the special moves used motion inputs. I will say though, I think it's weird to make such a big deal about removing motion inputs, when the supers still have them. Sure they're all (to my knowledge) just 22 inputs, but that is still just an inconvenient hurdle to a lot of people, rather than a fun and/or satisfying design choice. I don't really care that much though; it just makes supers inconvenient for me to throw out in neutral, and I think it might mess up wavedashing and then trying doing a special move, but I haven't been wavedashing much.
What I mind moreso about the inputs in this game is the input buffer. It's just really small, which simply just makes a lot of things harder than I'd like. Ideally, the devs add input buffer settings in the controls menu so that people who don't like high input buffer (masochists) can be quelled at least somewhat.
Something about the general game design I didn't really like is how crossups are weirdly super committal. Rather than just having characters automatically turn around after crossing up and hitting a button, or having moves that hit in front of and behind you, 2XKO seems to be designed for you to use these very specific crossup only normals for whenever you jump over the opponent. It gives your opponent a lot of agency to run under you in order to make your jump ins whiff which I didn't really like.
Defensive Mechanics
So far I haven't really vibed with this game's defensive mechanics. The main problem ones for me were Get Up Attacks and Parries.
Get Up Attacks only have like 5 frames of startup, so they're really hard to safejump, and they have fast enough recovery, plus enough pushback that they're occasionally safe on block. I imagine they'll be easier to deal with once I lab enough, although I'll explain later why I didn't bother with that yet. As a defender I felt really limited with how I could use them because you can only do them on wake up.
Parries on the other hand were just kinda hard to use because of their low active frames, and because of the game's not particularly generous input buffer.
Burst was also kinda annoying because there's very few ways to call it out. Burst being really strong isn't the worst thing in my book though. Punishing it was kinda awkward because the opponent gets force wall bounced when you block their burst, but to be honest I was lazy and just didn't even bother to try labbing out any burst punishes. On the bright side, I thought it was pretty cool how burst acts as an extra (albiet expensive) way to call out your partner for a tag for when their assist meter is on cooldown.
One thing I think could very likely be improved upon, since it doesn't require changing the core gameplay at all, is how there's seemingly no indicator yet as to what is and what isn't invincible. Just a little "Invincible" pop-up would go a long way, although there should probably be multiple types of pop-ups to clarify things that are only strike-invulnerable and stuff. Obviously you could just lab out what is and what isn't a reversal, but I don't find that a fun use of my time.
I'll give the game props for the backdash guard-cancel thingy that I forgot the name of. I think it's a cool twist on Pushblocking as a concept, and it felt good to do.
Movement
General
ground movement feels pretty good since dashes are so fast, can cancel
into stuff immediately.
I was worried that I wouldn't like wavedashing, and it turns out I don't, but that wasn't as big of a deal as I was expecting since backdash just straight up cancels into itself, and the forward run is competently fast. My dislike of wavedashing is probably gonna prop up the more I play the game though.
I
wasn't a fan of air movement since this game takes a very Marvel
approach, in not having a lot of baseline air movement options. Ekko
felt okay since he does have an airdash, but he can't air backdash so he
can be left in a lot of awkward spots. Illoai on the other hand was
even worse since she doesn't have any air dashes. It's not even the lack
of air options I dislike though, it's just the discrepancy between
characters that I personally dislike.
On a more "Huh, neat." kinda note, this
game has Melty Blood style aerial drift. This hasn't really seemed helpful at all so far, but it's neat.
Characters
I don't have any attachment to League Of Legends, but these characters seem to rule so far. Ekko has especially been a ton of fun. His bat normals remind me of Junpei in P4AU. Aside from his oki setups, he's been very intuitive for me to play so far.
Illaoi on the other hand has a lot of unintuitive combos to my brain, and approaching as her is kinda awkward, so she doesn't seem like someone I'd stick with. I still had some fun with her though.
My least favorite characters to fight were Ahri and Yasuo, because they were both hard to approach, and from what I played, they seemed to have the most consistently punishing combos. Ahri also had some seemingly knowledge check-y pressure resets. I just started randomly jabbing sometimes when she would airdash during her pressure, and sometimes the jabs would work.
Matches Are Relatively Long
A consequence of some of the defensive mechanics being hard to counteract, the game's strong backwards movement, and the fact that the game is a tag fighter that's first to 2 rounds per match, is that matches can go on pretty long. This could also (partially) be an unfortunate consequence of the game being hard to optimize. I imagine matches would go faster if I was able to do the crazy 80% health Illaoi combos that I got hit by occasionally, and/or if I could do Ekko left/right 50/50 orb setups instead of just trying and failing to safejump against get up attacks.
Also, I'm annoyed by how long Level 2 super animations are. Back when I was really getting into fighting games and playing Dragon Ball FighterZ, I didn't actually mind long, frequent super animations very much, but the more I play the genre, the more annoying they seem to become to me.
Game Solid For An Alpha
For an "alpha" this game seemed surprisingly polished. The only bugs I personally experienced (or at least noticed) were this:
-and the game crashing when you hit Quit Game. I don't know if this is even supposed to be here on the PS5 version. I'm not a console game developer but, it seems like consoles tend to not like it when games close themselves.
I've heard from others that there's some more bugs, but the game isn't bursting at the seems so I'd say things look well for its current state.
The netcode and lobbies also seem to work pretty well. Finicky connections seemed to happen infrequently enough that I'm willing to assume they're not on the game, and I didn't have any issues getting into lobbies, or queuing up for matches.
Example Of A Finicky Connection
Good online play seems to be the number one expectation for this game, so it's nice to see the game's delivering well on that front.
I heard some beginners were having issues due to the game not having skill based matchmaking, but I also heard a completely unsourced claim that there is skill based matchmaking:
Either way, I wonder what the skill based matchmaking will be like when the game comes out. People seem to have faith in Riot's ability to create meaningful ranked modes, but I haven't played any of their games so I don't totally know what to expect.
Duos Play
I tried out duos with BlueNoiR and things didn't go super well. We weren't in a call or anything, so we couldn't communicate mid-match which I imagine screwed us over pretty hard. I would've tried teaming with someone I know locally, but this alpha didn't allow local multiplayer in seemingly any capacity.
I wasn't really a fan of playing Duos since a bunch of your controls are restricted depending on whether you're the point or assist character at the moment. I've heard some people say you have "more control over your assists in Duos", but I have no idea what anyone would mean by that. I'm assuming they're not being totally literal since I'm pretty sure you don't have any new options compared to Solos. Getting hit in general also just feels worse in Duos, since it feels like I'm failing me and my teammate.
Despite not enjoying playing Duos though, I do respect it as a cool addition to the game that plenty of others will probably enjoy. Also, it was kinda trippy fighting against Duos since your opponents can have such drastically different playstyles from each other.
Learning The Game
The tutorial leaves you in the dark about a lot of details, I imagine to avoid overwhelming players, but at least for this alpha, there was no mission mode or whatever to learn stuff elsewhere. So you're left to either mess around for hours and hours in training mode, research the game's mechanics through the World Wide Web (which I hate doing, especially for new games when all the info is scattered), or just say screw it and throw yourself into the wolves of online play.
Some of the training mode settings are a tad confusing. Most notably for me, the option to set the dummy to do get up attacks isn't in the Reversal settings, and I didn't find out it was in another menu until the very last day of the alpha. I was able to come up with a separate way to lab against them using the dummy record features, but it was really tedious to use so I didn't bother trying much. Also, the reversal settings menu was a mess. It's just a giant, indiscerniblly organized list.
The training mode does seem to be adequate though when you know where things are. Although there's still some stuff, like a save state feature, which would make for nice additions.
Presentation
The game just looks great on all fronts I think. The game was super colorful, the cellshading helped the colors pop really well, hit effects and stuff looked awesome, animations had just the right amount of fluidity to feel great, the UI was super stylish yet readable.
(Side Note: I don't know what specifically is wrong with it's settings, it might be the contrast but, the TV I played this on looks slightly off, yet because I played on that TV, everywhere else I see the game looks slightly off.)
The lobbies were super cute. They felt super lively, I think in part due to how compact everything is. Seeing matches played on a big screen was really cool also; that screen's a nice thing to look at when just sitting around and waiting for a match.
I really liked my lobby avatar also. There wasn't a tons and tons of clothing unsurprisingly, but there were tons of color options which was really nice. I love slathering cosmetics in dark pinks and purples.
I don't know where else to mention this so I'll just mention it here, I completed the battlepass (which isn't even going to transfer over to the full game anyways). 😎
The game also sounded great. The sounds effects were all very satisfying. I remember hearing some qualms that the music might end up really boring because it's adaptive music, but I think the music is turning out well so far. None of the music blew me away though. The announcer was also really nice. This is one of my favorite fighting game announcers in a while.
Hopes For The Game's Future
The "prophecy" was that this game would "save the fighting game genre", but I think it's late for that. Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, and Tekken 8 are all doing really well from my understanding, so I don't think the genre needs "saving", but I do think this could shape up to be an incredibly fun game that brings a ton of people into the genre anyways. I'm looking forward to playing it again.
I do still somewhat fear that the game could completely change into something I like way less by the time it launches, but we'll just have to wait and see. I personally hope the devs don't end up being too reactionary, because then game will adhere to the vocal masses' uncreative, knee jerk design choices, and as you can maybe guess by how I just described them, I hate the vocal masses' ideas.
Still, I'm holding out hope that the game will turn out well.
(Update: April 24, 2025)
Alpha Lab 2
This was much shorter than last alpha (being only 3 days rather than 12(?)), and I wasn't really in the mood to play it much, so I didn't end up playing this alpha a ton. I didn't get any clips or images because of the aforementioned reason (I only ended up recording 1 thing), and because for some reason sharing them was completely unavailable on PS5 for some reason. This problem was also in the first alpha, but it was fixed in the first few days.
Gameplay Changes
My favorite gameplay change is pushblock now being tied to assist rather than super meter. I find such a surprisingly elegant way to keep pushblock both readily accessible, but not spamable, and it adds some risks to calling assists that I like.Forward ground-tech, and the reworked hard knockdown systems are also pretty big changes that I overall liked. The changes made knockdonws a lot more actively interesting I think. It was confusing trying to figure out how hard knockdowns work though, I never quite did.
I'm down with most of the input changes, even though my button layout makes the new super inputs even harder to remember, although I think I'd like a little tweaking on the Tag input. I kept inputting Tag by accident because I kept tapping the T button for just a bit too long when trying to call assists, I think either bumping up the length of the button hold required, or locking Tag to only 5T would help.
My least favorite change is assist running now being locked to the new Sidekick Fuse, because I really enjoyed how dominant assists were before. Because of the assist nerfs, I opted to start using the Freestyle Fuse instead of 2X Assist since now without the ability for assists to run forward, I think Freestyle easily has the better pressure now. Without the assist running, the first assist called with 2X Assist has totally lost its ability to delay its attack after being called, and the second assist often struggles to even be in range of the opponent. As for the new Fuses, they don't really appeal to me, but I think it's cool that they're there.
I imagine the altered combo routes have a large impact on the gameplay, but I didn't remember my old BNB's, nor did I come up with new ones, so I can't really judge the combo changes from experience.
Etcetera
Jynx is the only new character this time around, I tried her out and didn't really care much for her, so I just stuck to Ekko/Illaoi.The menus didn't really seem better. A new issue with this version specifically was the battlepass menus. There were 2 ways of "accessing" the battlepass, but one of them would lead to a seemingly broken, largely empty menu. The new costumes are good, although they didn't appeal to me specifically. For some reason there were a bunch of random cosmetics like title plates which most of them seemingly weren't unlockable.
Aside from that one battlepass menu, I didn't experience any notable bugs or netcode issues, but I doubt my experience is very representative considering how I only played a couple of hours (I didn't even play enough to complete the battlepass this time around 😔).
Discourse
There seem to be 3 main pieces of discourse this time around. One of them's something I mentioned in a previous blog post (that I accidentally deleted), the game's planned to only launch with 10 characters. I don't really mind this since every character is planned to be unlockable for free, but I am worried on how the process of unlocking characters will be. There were a lot of problems with MultiVersus's launch, but I think the most damaging ones were the character unlock systems (I'll go more into detail when I make my MultiVersus Part 2 post), and I hope to not see another game repeat the same mistakes. It's particularly worrying that (as far as I can tell) there's been no mention of how many characters will be unlocked by default.The more immediately topical discourse though is over timeouts. Timeouts happen more frequently, and people already didn't seem super down with how frequently timeouts happened before, so you might be able to imagine how people feel now. I don't like timeouts being so frequent either, but I'm not particularly upset by them so far. My scrubby take on how I'd like timeouts to be mitigated is by uping the overall damage output. There's plenty of fine ways for the devs to mitigate timeouts though, so I wouldn't be that disappointed to see damage remain the overall same.
Ranked was added in this alpha; I'm not enough of a tryhard to have wanted to bother with it though. People took issue with it being lobby based, since (from what I understand) Riot has a reputation of having very streamlined matchmaking systems which people enjoy, and forcing people to use lobbies in this game just adds extra steps that a lot of people don't wanna bother with. I've also heard concerns over the potential for Rank boosting through using Duos + Juggernaut Fuse (basically it allows you to play Ranked with a teammate who literally never has to play), but I haven't heard if anyone actually did this to a significant extent. Perhaps I'm just ignorant, but I don't imagine Rank boosting would become a large issue, even if this remained untouched, I do agree that it's a silly exploit to even exist in the first place though. The more disappointing aspect to me is that each account only gets an individual Rank, rather than individual character or character pair Ranks.
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