I am going to say that after sinking a good amount of time into this game as well as running offline tournaments for my local scene, I think the game is SO CLOSE to being good. But it can only be "so close" for so long. I personally do not like this game, but I do think it is a good game; hence why I don't really want to give it a negative review. I think if you're coming from Ultimate, PM/P+ or Melee it's a great game. That being said, I have a TON of deep frustrations with it.

I REALLY want this game to succeed; I think it actually has a lot going for it especially if you're coming from Ultimate or PM; Solid mechanics, a BS yet fun roster of characters, and a dev team that supports the competitive scene. These are all things that are really nice to have in a platforn fighter. With a promising future ahead and the dev team keeping a lot of their promises with more content to come, I'll be keeping an eye on this game's future.

HOWEVER

Coming from having nearly 1k hours on RoA1, this just feels like a letdown to me. It completely shafted the identity of the original game save for hitfalling and the characters. I understand that the idea was to appeal to all platform fighter communities; that's great! That's a good thing to do. However, it is EXTREMELY difficult, and despite the talent of the dev team, that difficulty shows here in dividends. It feels like a bunch of foreign mechanics were put together and they did their damndest to make them work and unfortunately they just don't. The thing that frustrates me the most is the addition of shields and ledges, but not in the way you may assume. I am totally fine with shields and ledges; I come from Smash Ultimate, I'm used to that being a mechanic. However, those characters were designed with shields in mind. Rivals characters were not. As a result, playing around shields just feels weird and foreign for a lot of these characters, except really for Lox and Fleet. Honestly, the shields aren't even the bad part though; the ledge feels ATROCIOUS. Free edgeguarding by just grabbing the ledge and dropping with an aerial, getting your walljump back when you hit someone makes it impossible to recover against a good few characters if you're forced to go low, and most getup attacks being HUGE is also pretty annoying, though that's more a skill issue on my part.

PLEASE GOD ADD WHIFFLAG BACK. So many characters can just mash aerials at you and boom you can't do anything about it. The general safety on shield in this game is absurd because so many characters lack a solid out of shield option so just fullhopping and mashing an aerial is something that I've had go completely unpunished even in high platinum/low diamond, against players that really should be able to punish that.

There are so many ways to be punished for hitting your opponent in this game it's absurd. I have no issue with crouch cancelling as a mechanics but it is absolutely not okay in the current state it's in. So many neutral exchanges just boil down to hit -> cc counterhit tilt -> cc counterhit tilt -> so on and so forth and it's just whoever has the fastest mashable combo starter wins eventually I guess? Idk it's so frustrating. Positioning myself to score a hit and then being punished for hitting my opponent will never feel good in any capacity regardless of how much of a "skill issue" it might be.

So many of the characters in this game feel simply lobotimized from their prior incarnations. I dropped Forsburn in this game despite RoA1 Forsburn being my favorite fighting game character EVER, platfighter or traditional fighter. It just feels terrible to not feel like I'm able to express with my character in the way that I'm used to, his gameplan got so simplified and he feels so painful to play while also being filthy broken. The closest character to RoA1 I feel I have in this game is Etalus and don't even get me STARTED on how tragic his port to RoA2 was. I know the team at Aether Studios was so adamant about "Guys it's not Rivals 1 it's its own game!" but in trying to make something different they made something that makes me feel homesick.

Alright, rant over. Game is so damn close to being good but I'm starting to lose faith after like 5 patches straight of "It's so close guys!".

my friends keep holding down when i hit them please patch this

trash