If you have been playing videogames for a while, chances are you have heard of Riot’s superhit game League of Legends, where you and your teammates fight an enemy team for the control of a map in a 5v5 match, by controlling one of the many available characters, each with their own skills and gameplay styles. It’s an incredibly popular game with a dedicated fanbase and it even has its own worldwide tournament scene.
Given the immense success of the game, media and spin-offs have naturally appeared. One such memorable mention is the show Arcane, which I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone, even if you’ve never heard of League of Legends. The other mention is the game I want to talk about today, 2XKO. Initially dubbed as Project L and announced in 2019, 2XKO is a free to play tag fighting game, where you can play as one of the many heroes that you can find in both League of Legends or Arcane. It was promised as a complete game changer and a revolution to the fighting game genre when it was announced. Whether this actually happened… remains to be seen.
After creating a Riot account in order to access all the functionalities of the game and completing the initial tutorial, I… was stumped, truth be told. The menu of the game was straight out confusing to me and it took a while to focus on the “Play” button, hidden in the top left corner of the screen. The UI is very messy, largely focusing on selling you the Season Pass and skins, while utterly failing at actually helping you access the game modes you care about. And even after I magically found the game options menu… the options were incredibly limited. Casual matches, Ranked, which is locked until you reach a specific character level, Versus mode, which is somehow lumped in with the Online game modes, and… Learning Hub, which is a separate menu and contains tutorials, combo trials and training mode.
Finally, once I reached the training mode and decided to try out some characters, I was baffled by the number of characters I have at my disposal: only 12 characters available, 6 of them being locked. This is an astoundingly small roster for a regular fighting game, let alone a 2v2 tag fighter. Yes, you can unlock the other 6 characters by grinding out in-game currency, but as a comparison, League of Legends was launched with 40 characters and it currently has a 172 characters roster. 12 characters for a fighting game is, honestly, nowhere near enough.
Once I got past the initial disappointment however, I discovered that 2XKO is an actually good looking fighting game that is easy to learn, but incredibly hard to master. At a first glance, the game is dreadfully simple when it comes to inputs: Gone are the intricate quarter circle forward, charge or pretzel motions that older fighting games have. Here, you have 3 buttons for regular attacking (light, medium, hard), one button for tagging in your partner and the shoulder buttons to fire up a special attack. Pressing a regular and a special attack + one input lets you fire up a super, provided you have the required meter for it. You don’t even have to dash anymore, you even have a button for that.
The characters’ moveset and fighting styles also resemble their original method of playing from League of Legends, even if the games themselves are completely different genre-wise. For instance, Vi is a mean girl with a pair of huge gloves, so obviously she would be the brawler of this game. Her counterpart Jinx is a menace with guns, so in 2XKO she’s the ranged character who prefers shooting the enemy from afar instead of getting up close and personal. So basically, if you want to jump in and press buttons with a friend, this is the perfect game to do so: grab 2 characters that you like the most (provided that they are unlocked) and just hop in and have fun! Theoretically, this was the aim of 2XKO in the first place, according to the developers.
The game itself also looks incredibly good in my opinion. I will give praise to the designers, they really knew how to animate these characters. The animation quality really is at its peak when you fire a super or an ultra attack, especially true for Yasuo or Ahri.
However, once you try to do more than “just mash buttons” and learn the mechanics of this game, you might soon be slightly overwhelmed. If played seriously, 2XKO really is not a fighting game for the faint of heart: the tag system is incredibly complex and dare I say convoluted even, the combo routes and options could challenge even the most versed fighting game connoisseurs (Caitlyn’s combo trials actually humbled me) and high level matches can honestly get overwhelming.
The most complex gameplay mechanic might be the tag modifiers, or fuse system. There are 5 of them and each of them can be considered gameplay changers:
- Double Down – the default fuse, it allows both you and your partner to combo your super attacks, dealing extra damage
- Freestyle – freely allowing you to swap between you and your partner twice, as long as they are on the screen
- 2xAssist – your tag partner gets multiple assist attack types.
- Juggernaut – play as one buffed character only
- Sidekick – your tag partner cannot be tagged or defeated, he just helps with unique attacks.
If tag fighting is not your type of fighting game, consider picking Double Down or Juggernaut, since these are probably the easiest Fuse Systems to deal with. On the flipside, Freestyle is probably the hardest tag system I have seen in a tag game, however if learned, it’s by far the most overpowered and unfair system of them all.
In all seriousness, the game knows how to fool you into thinking you know how to play, only to meet someone who actually put several hundreds of hours into the game. I shamefully admit that I met a Freestyle player that not only perfected me once (I could not damage him once), but also pulled a dual combo so long I actually didn’t bother anymore and went to grab a cup of coffee.
I ultimately appreciate that the game has this kind of depth. It doesn’t feel like a generic button mashing game, there was some thought put behind its mechanics. If you also take all the characters’ quirks into consideration, such as Yasuo’s stances or Blitzcrank’s Steam mechanic, you have one of the most intricate fighting games released in the past years. If only it had more characters to experiment with…
Trophy wise, the game is relatively simple, but it can be trivialized via boosting with a friend. For the purpose of this review however, I got almost every trophy without help, with the exception of one which required playing 10 private matches with a friend.
There were two particular trophies that were actually tricky. One of them is winning via 2XKO, which means defeating both of the opponent’s characters at the same time. This can be done only when the opponent calls in the assist and it took a few tries. Thankfully, Jinx’s laser pistol was more than helpful for this trophy.
The other trophy that is a pain to get is earning 50 character masteries. Each character has three particular “masteries” that can be leveled up: win x matches, use move x or use move y a set number of time. For instance, Jinx would have “Win 10 matches, use 90 explosives, deal x damage via bullets” . Once you complete a mastery, you unlock its next tier, for example win 25 matches instead of 10. Some of these characters have awful masteries, one such character being Yasuo whose gameplay isn’t the simplest. It was the grindiest trophy I had to do and it took a long while to get it. Obviously, if you have a friend, boosting is the easier solution here.
Unfortunately, there’s not much else to say about the game. And this cycles back to its original issue – there’s too little content here to actually keep one’s interest in the game. The game looks good, sure, and the characters have a great moveset, but you don’t have anything of substance. For a game that took seven years to develop, not only was it launched at an odd time and with no marketing, but I expected it to have at least an Arcade Mode or Story Mode, to give me more background info about the characters I am playing as.
The game also has an unexpected problem of struggling to find its audience. For League/Arcane fans, the roster is far too small even though the control scheme is simple. For a fighting game enthusiast, even if the gameplay is tight, there’s simply not enough game modes or options to convince one to play 2XKO instead of Street Fighter 6 or Tekken 8. And then there’s the pages and pages of Season passes and skins and bundles…yeah, it is a free game, but I don’t see many paying for an Ahri skin in this game, compared to League of Legends.
Still, 2XKO can absolutely be a fun time, as long as you keep your expectations in check. Whether you just want to relax or go technical, the game can fulfill both those needs from a gameplay point of view. The developers did promise that a roadmap is planned and more content is on the way, but unless they add some serious meat to this game’s bones, I don’t see 2XKO managing to gain a strong and stable fanbase, especially considering that Marvel Tokon, another tag fighter with Marvel characters, is soon to be launched. So I hope I’ll see more actual content in the future… together with an UI overhaul, hopefully.
