Handful Of Platform Fighters
Featuring Rivals Of Aether, Rivals Of Aether 2, Fraymakers, Slap City, Cross Impact, Stardust Valkyries, Brawlhalla, and Samurai Gunn 2
Rivals Of Aether
I see why this game is considered such a classic, it feels very snappy and polished. The characters are an especially bright highlight, they're very inventive with their gimmicks, and they all stand out from each other. Kragg for example is a hard hitting, slow heavyweight, but he also has a massive projectile that doesn't dissipate upon hitting opponents, and can he summon his own platforms with walls.
Like most platform fighters, this game is designed with analog inputs in mind which I'm not a big fan of. This game, alongside all the games in this post, do have option to play with d-pad inputs instead, so at least I'm not forced to use analog inputs. This game also carries over the Smash Bros design of dash attack overriding other attack inputs, with wavedashing allowing you to mitigate the issue. This is the first game to my knowledge to have what I've heard described as "easy wavedashing" (pressing jump plus dodge at the same time to wavedash), but by my standards I still think they're annoyingly difficult, so I find the way dash attacks are designed to be bothersome as well.
The Story mode is very lacking, the stories are incredibly basic (Wrastor's story is just him and a buddy fighting Kragg), and the gameplay is just a string of fights against CPU's (which are almost all disconnected from the plot), with an alright (albeit easy) boss fight at the very end. I was kinda surprised just how lacking the story was, because I totally assumed this was the kind of series with a bunch of in depth story, but I guess I gotta go check out the Tales Of Aether comics for something to chew on. The Story mode also predates the issue I have with Smash Ultimate's Classic Mode, I find lack of randomization in what battles you do to hamper the replay value when compared to a traditional arcade mode (Smash 64's Classic Mode also has this issue, but I find it's particular battles more interesting than a lot of Smash Ultimate and especially Rivals Of Aether fights).
The Abyss is probably the most interesting side mode. It's a survival mode, it actually features some modifiers to the CPU's to add some variety, and there are unlockable, character specific perks that you can equip. It has optional co-op, plus the perks can be used in Versus battles. My main issue with it is that I find unlocking the perks to be very time consuming. At least the Perks get pretty crazy.
Versus mode is unsurprisingly where I spend most of my time. Aside from the aforementioned perks, there's also Turbo mode, and Stamina. Turbo is pretty fun, it lets you cancel any attack on hit into any other action, which lets you perform even nuttier combos than normal, I almost always play with it on since I'm not that good at comboing in this game in the first place, so I'm not usually doing anything egregious with Turbo enabled. Stamina has characters wrap around the screen instead of getting KO-ed when they get launched to the blastzone, it's pretty chaotic, and well suited for free-for-alls I think. I like for the stages, there are alternate skinfs for all of them, alongside gameplay variants with silly layouts and hazards. Casual and competitive variants being available for every stage gives this game's stagelist a really good balance of both types. There's also Tetherball, but I just don't really care for it.
There's one more pretty major addition that elevates this game to being one of the coolest fighting games ever, Steam Workshop support. The Steam Workshop warps this game from what I'd consider a solid indie fighting game, to one with an incredibly deep well of fun and imaginative ideas. When it comes to fighting games with mod support, MUGEN is what I think usually comes to people's minds as the premier mod based fighting game, but I think Rivals Of Aether has a few things over MUGEN. The Steam Workshop in particular is such a convenient way to download mods, which grants Rivals Of Aether a pretty smooth experience on the user end. Rivals Of Aether's more limited controls and engine do of course limit how varried mods can be compared to MUGEN, but in a way that's a blessing since the consistency makes it way easier to learn characters. The addition of mod support is what led to this being my most played game on Steam. There are tons of mods that I love, so many of them are things I never knew I would've wanted.
There are so many though, that'd I'd prefer to list off a bunch of my favorites in a separate post. My biggest issue with the mod support is the menus used to select, and order them. Mods are just put into massive lists (separated by type), and as I download hundreds of them, they get tedious to sift through. There is a categorization feature, but it doesn't do much. I think being able to stuff mods into different folders (in-game) would help a lot. I also wish I could select multiple Buddies, there are mods that change how you play based on what Buddy you have equipped, and I'd like to mix and match them.
There are some extra features that also make this game pretty sweet. Rollback netcode is nice. You can play with Workshop content online, although from what I can tell the netcode seemingly reverts to delay based when doing so (I may be wrong on that, I'm not an expert, it just felt bad to me). You can fully control your characters while select screen, which acts as both a fantastic button check, and a fantastic way to try out characters before selecting them. There also a custom color creator, here's one of mine.
This game also features maybe the best Training mode I've ever seen in a platform fighter. You can actually lab out and practice specific situations that don't involve an idling CPU. It could benefit from having counter-attack settings though.
Rivals Of Aether 2
This game feels like it's in early access. From a core gameplay standpoint it's still pretty good, but it's lacking in features. There's not even a story at all this time, it's just an arcade mode, yet battles are still non-randomized (there's a bit more variety in the type of battles though). As of writing this there's no Aether Stages (the casual ones), Turbo, Stamina, Abyss, Workshop, or Tetherball. There's a couple small, single player modes at least, Target Test, Eyebreak, and Edgeguard Training (all 3 of these are for training, but this one's not even gamified). Straight up Training Mode is pretty good, it does have counter-attack settings, alongside other stuff that wasn't in the first game.
It's clunkier though, sometimes settings just don't seem to work and I don't know why. The menus in general are kinda clunky in this game. In this game's current state, I would recommend the original over instead. It currently has post-launch support though, its planned to continue receiving it for years, and a lot of the missing stuff is specifically planned to return, so I could see this game becoming really good in the future.
Again, I think the gameplay is good. Rivals Of Aether 1 had part of its identity rooted in what mechanics it didn't carry over from Smash Bros, so I've heard some people complain that this game looses a bit of identity from carrying over more from Smash Bros. I agree, and I prefer the last game mechanically (I find some things like Ledges and Floor Hugging to be obnoxious), but also I think it's cool to see the characters have access to more universal tools.
My favorite character from the none of my favorite characters from the first game were in this one during launch, and I struggled finding someone I liked instead. I initially settled on Wrastor, and ended up performing very poorly in Ranked, obtaining the worst Rank in the game, Stone. The Ranked system is good from what I can tell, I think it was legitimately fair for me to end up there, but I was surprised at how competent Stone players can be. I think Wisely's video "I Fought the Literal Best and Worst Player in the World" displays and explains it very well, even low level players tend to have a grasp of what they're doing, their primary issue tends to be not screwing up.
Does this mean Rivals Of Aether 2 is actually really easy? Well it's in my ego's interest to say otherwise, so I'd guess the relatively high skill level of this game compared to something like Smash probably has to do with the less casual audience it attracts. After playing Wrastor for a couple of months, a costume would release that would make me reconsider playing Fleet instead. Once I started playing her, I started hovering in Silver instead (2 ranks above Stone), and I generally began having more fun since I actually ended up liking her gameplay a lot more than Wrastor's.
Once again I was reminded that I actually do quite enjoy costumes in video games. Even if I don't miss their presence when games don't have costumes, when a game does have costumes then they can rope me into playing more. I estimate I probably wouldn't even have 20 hours in this game if there weren't costumes that I wanted to unlock, but because there are costumes I care about, I've played nearly 60 hours as of writing this. I haven't been roped into buying any costumes though, I don't tend to spend real money on cosmetics. Instead I grind for the premium currency, and I find the grinding very tedious since I don't love the game a ton. It sucks that you're only able to freely obtain a limited amount of the premium currency, but I'm not surprised. I guess it's worth noting the previous game also had costumes, but there were far fewer of them, and the game's monetization wasn't as based around them from what I can tell. There's some other types of cosmetics in this game as well, like this Critical Hit effect that makes me feel very cool.
I wanna note an incident that particularly validated the way I feel about platform fighters, Sajam's first time playing this game. For context, Sajam is a big defender of difficulty within fighting games, he has a YouTube playlist primarily discussing why difficulty should not be so worried about so much in fighting games, and he has over 50 videos in which he plays Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R (often considered one of the most hardcore fighting games of all time), so it's generally understood that he's not just some salty scrub.
You don't gotta watch the videos I embed. I know this one's long, I just like embedding stuff.
Sajam's main takeaway was that he wished the game launched with in-game tutorials (something I totally forgot about before writing this part). There's also the takeaway that Twitch chat is a horrible way to learn a video game, but I imagine Sajam, alongside plenty of other people were already well aware of that. What personally interested me though was seeing what Sajam struggled with, and seeing how platform fighter fans reacted to Sajam's experience, quite a bit of people were surprised at just how much he struggled as a newcomer. I think the notion that Smash Bros and platform fighters are straight up easier than other fighting games is a misconception. They have some specifically easier elements, but I think people often take their own skill and knowledge for granted, and gloss over the ways in which platform fighters tend to be more difficult than other fighting games. I could also go into how difficulty is subjective, but I'm not interested in continually unraveling things here and now.
(Note: This game is in Early Access as of writing this)
I think this game is solid, but I'm not really thrilled by the ways in which it tries to stand out. Air-dash putting you into special fall unless you land a hit with it seems like a reasonable balance decision to me, but it makes the mechanic feel lamer in this game compared to others. I don't really care much for assists as a mechanic on their own, I like them when they synergize with mechanics like active tag, but this game ain't a tag fighter. Plus instead of a quick cooldown, their meters have to be manually recovered by attacking the opponent, and they fill up slowly which I'm not a fan of. Assists in a platform fighter are a novel concept from what I know, so I give props to that at least. The one mechanic I'd say feels wack is shields, you have to pick between shielding left or right, but you can't switch between them while shielding, you just have to preemptively pick a direction.
This isn't the first or last time a platform fighter has starred indie game icons, so the roster already doesn't stand out to me a ton. It especially doesn't help that 2 of the 6 (very soon to be 7) characters are from other platform fighters. I main Welltaro, but I appreciate that Octodad is there, I have nostalgia for the Octodad games (I didn't know until looking it up that the Octodad developers also made Bugsnax). There's a lot of cool characters in the assist pool, but they're just assists rather than fully playable characters. Mechanically, the assists probably have some of the most inventive design in this entire game. Example?
The stagelist is really lacking, there's only 5 (soon to be 6) of them. Most of them have casual and competitive variants, but I don't particularly love any of the casual stages, and none of the competitive stages have layouts that haven't already been burned into my mind by other games.
One issue I tend to have with platform fighters is putting together an ideal control scheme, and this game is probably the best example of that. There are some other buttons I'd like to bound, this game has plenty of macros, but there's just too many to fit on a standard controller.
I forgot about the pause button while writing the list above. I ain't unbounding that from start,
Granted, these are not all necessary, and other platform fighters don't even give this many options. I appreciate this game has so many options (being able to bind stuff other than movement and smash attacks to the sticks would be nice though), my issue moreso just stems from how platform fighters tend to be designed. What I'd like more than all these optional buttons is for less stuff to be shoved onto the same few buttons in the first place. Also, this game tied menu controls to your battle controls, which I really dislike (I've got Y as confirm and A as deny). (That previous complaint was addressed while I was late into writing this.)
There's not very many gamemodes to play, pretty much just Versus and Training. Versus does have an okay selection of gameplay modifiers to play around with.
Training lacks dummy recordings and counter attack settings, which I consider to be some of the most fundamental tools for a training mode, but there are save states which are nice.
This game has one other ace up its sleeve though, Steam Workshop support. I'd guess because this game isn't as popular as Rivals Of Aether, and because the amount of effort it takes to make a character on par with the base roster is larger (characters in this game have more actions and more detailed sprites), people seem to prefer making mods for that game instead. There are some good looking stage mods, but I haven't had any character mods wow me. Since assists are just a core mechanic in this game, they're more common in this game's Workshop. I have a feeling the Rivals Of Aether 2 Workshop may have similar problems when that rolls around, I imagine modeling and animating a 3D character will be too much for a lot of people (with the Aether series's larger popularity though, I could see there being at least some stuff I find cool).
The most fun mods I have in this are just silly stuff.
Slap City
I see why people had faith in Ludosity for Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, this game's cool. Most of the games on here focus on being more combo centric than Smash Bros, and this game's probably the most so out of everything here. I'm not the most qualified to say this considering my skill level, but I'd say this game does a good job at riding the line between silly fun, but not broken. It's great for making a novice like me feel cool while playing. I really like playing as Orka.
Mechanically, it's pretty standard for a platform fighter, with only 1 addition I'd note, the Clutch button. I wouldn't call it a huge addition though, it acts as a miscellaneous button that effects specific moves in specific ways. I'm actually a lot more okay with how this game designs around wavedashing than most other platform fighters. There aren't dash attacks, instead you can simply just cancel your dash into any attack. Wavedashing still has a ton of utility though because tons of normals can be jump-cancelled on hit, and wavedashing allows you to slide on the ground despite the jump cancel. The jump-canceling into wavedashing are part of why Fox and Falco's "Shine" is considered so flexible in Melee, and that kind of thing gets to be on a way larger variety of attacks in this game. A massive part of my general acceptance of wavedashing in this game though is due to the input leniency, there's up to a 10 frame buffer in this game (I think the game should allow for higher but the fact that there's even a setting for it gives me a lot more respect), and being able to input wavedash during it helps me a ton.
Gamemode wise this game isn't great, but I like some of the stuff. Versus doesn't have a ton of ways to change up gameplay, Training is pretty lacking, and Online has crossplay but not rollback. Arcade has plenty enough variety and randomness for me to consider it replayable though. The Story mode is probably the most standout mode, it's comprised primarily of platforming levels which I find easiest to compare to Subspace Emissary in Super Smash Bros Brawl. The levels and story didn't blow me away, it's pretty short on a per character basis, and it takes a traditional fighting game approach of putting characters through minor variations of the same story, but it was fun enough for me to play through a couple of times.
Lastly I wanna note the stages. There's a good few standard ones, but there's also some really silly ones that stick out in my mind.
I don't think this game is very good in its current state, but it's free (without any sort of paid DLC or microtransactions) and on like version 0.5, so I'm really dissatisfied by it. Movesets don't tend to tie together very well, the assists are all terrible from what I've tried, and settings are like impossible to save (most annoyingly are the controls). The main reason I came to this game (aside from it being free) is Jumbo Josh, who I enjoy ironically, and this game delivered on a playable Jumbo Josh that amused me.
His jumpsquat length + jump height are increased depending on how long you hold the jump button.
This game does have rollback, and Steam Workshop support which is cool. I haven't gotten any of the Steam Workshop stuff to work yet though, and there's barely anything on there at the moment anyways.
Stardust Valkyries
Out of every game here, this one feels the least for me. This game does some of stuff I like in platform fighters, it's designed around digital rather than analog movement, there aren't dash attacks to get in the way of your other attacks, yet it's maybe also has the most for tryhard gearded design out of every game in this post. Probably the most apparent hardcore mechanic is L-canceling, which from my understanding is a mechanic even Project M players have been split on because of how demanding it can be to perform so frequently. This game also seems to use Fox as a reference point for a lot of character gameplay designs, most characters seem to have an equivalent to his Shine (that could be a shortsighted observation though). Characters in also just move around really fast, which is particularly apparent by the lack walking of any sort, and from the instant acceleration. Admittedly moving around so fast so naturally is somewhat appealing, and I'm sure plenty of people would like it, but I find it's to a point of making the movement noticeably more difficult for my liking.
In terms of gamemodes, there's Versus, a Survival mode, Training, and Online. I wanna point out in Training, there are actually combo trials which don't tend to appear very often in platform fighters. Teaching super specific combos doesn't tend to be super useful in platform fighters, especially due to how much interactivity opponents tend to have, but I think it's still cool to have combo trials. They definitely reinforce my idea that I find this game hard, for better or for worse. Some of them don't even work though due to the game being in early access.
One aspect I'm particularly underwhelmed by in this game is the stages. I don't know if they'll be expanded later, but what's present at the moment of writing this is just some of the most functionally bog standard platform fighter stages.
Brawlhalla
I played this game here and there a while ago (around 2016 and 2018 I think), going back to it, I'd say it holds up. Now having played and enjoyed MultiVersus a ton, I can't help but draw a bunch of comparisons between the things I like (and dislike) about both of these games. I don't feel myself getting as sucked in like with MultiVersus though, I doubt this'll skyrocket to being my most played game on Steam.
Getting the bad outta the way, this game's free to play, but in the but there's plenty of microtransactions to suck your money. You can at least unlock all of the characters for free though. Also, I've noticed a ton of "Brawlhalla is DYING 📉" videos recently. I tried skimming through one to see what the issues were, but frankly none of it was stuff I cared about.
The gameplay is really unique. I really like that how items are implemented into the game, I think it's a shame that so many platform fighters skip out on or half-bake their items, so seeing a game with items implemented so deeply into the core mechanics is cool to me. Plenty of people definitely don't like this, but I like it when platform fighters are more dodge heavy like this game. I don't particularly like that characters have such similar movesets (for context, most attacks are copy and pasted between characters, albeit with stat differences), although I'm too bothered by it, especially since largely just play 1 character.
I'm glad Rayman gets to be in this game, Rayman's one of my favorite video game series, and Rayman is my most wanted character in Super Smash Bros. He's his own playable character, rather than a costume like most crossover characters, so I could actually unlock him for free. I'm not super keen on this game's combo system, but I've been able to string together some stuff with him :)
This game's oddly lacking in music.
This game's pretty great feature-wise. It's got rollback and crossplay on seemingly every device (even Android and IOS). It also has a bunch of gamemodes, some of them are really unique.
I don't have much to say about the stages, but there's a bunch of them as well. I think the training mode could use some work though.
Samurai Gunn 2
I almost forgot to even mention this game here (that's why it's last). I'd say it moreso resembles Duck Game than Super Smash Bros, which I'd say leads to it being pretty easy to pick up and play. One problematic aspect for the game's nature though is its lack of explanations for passives. They're explained on the official website, but for some reason in-game they simply aren't.
Website | In-game
Ammo refreshing upon getting a kill also isn't explained. Anyways, the game feels very good, the movement resembles regular platformers much more than fighting games which I'm pleased with, and I'd say it's the snappiest feeling game here.
Gamemodes wise, this game's pretty small, but also unfinished. The only thing to play other than versus battles is the story mode, and while it's pretty short, it's decently promising. The enemies are pretty simple, but they're elevated by the interesting level design.
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