Rivals 2 Steam Charts & Stats

was fucking with the game and now i cant play online dont know whats going on but this sucks i go on streams and people are playing fine online but everytime i que just gets stuck on matched

is their going to be any kinda fix for the lag that I and other people seem to be having playing online?? literally the only game in my library that lags as bad as this game

takes forever to find a match and the off stage/recovery mechanics are hot ass.

These devs wouldnt even be able to balance a kilogram of steel and a kilogram of feathers

this game feels like it has all the good parts of smash bros melee, but with the quality of life you'd want from a modern game. It's more accessible and easier to learn than Melee, but you can still do all the cool movement. All the DLC and future content is free, so if you're interested in platform fighter games at all, there's no reason not to buy this

I want to preface this review by saying i have around 250-300 hours on the original Rivals of Aether. I played it a TON on xbox when it came out while also clocking in a lot of hours on the switch and pc ports of the game too. The reason i could was because of how approachable this game feels at any skill level. The game felt so competitive due to the depth that existed within its said simplicity while also having snappy and fluid controls. Every character feels not only good to play but also their kits make so much sense, it made learning every character feasible and fun. Rivals of Aether 2 doesn't feel like a sequel to that game, it feels like the developers trying to make a new platform fighter with all the experience and tools they've learned from the 10 years of making and maintaining Rivals 1 but labeled as this brand new and improved Rivals game. This shift in game play isnt because of the new options added to matches (special pummels, grabs, ext), its because of the how anti casual this game is. Crouch canceling, hit stun lasting way too long, and a lack of tutorials really, REALLY, hurt the fun value of this game. This game boils down to who can combo the other longer while giving inexperienced players zero tools to help build their fundamentals so that they learn to play. Again i have like 250 hours on rivals 1 and 500 on smash ultimate, i understand how these games play, but getting good at this game is not fun AND not accessible for the majority of people who are trying to get into plat fighters. I dont understand the appeal of learning something by smashing your head into a wall over and over again for 70 hours and still seeing zero results. This is the only game ive ever played where if you want to get better you need to stop playing the game and find external resources specially tailored to your shortcomings instead of learning how to play the game from just playing it... If you have the patience to get good despite not seeing any progress, friends to help you learn that are around your skill level, and are unemployed i think that this game is defintely worth trying out. The highs of this game are really make you feel like you are a gamer but this game does not make it easy to maintain that feeling. Those small moments of hype from pulling off nail biting victories and sick ass combos are just too thinly spread in a game that is mainly defined by its own anti fun narrative. TLDR: play game, loose, discover the skill issue, improve, lose to something different, discover the skill issue, improve, loose, and repeat.

This game keeps getting more unstable every patch. constant crashes, character balance that is weird and nonsensical, a large majority of players keep asking for very specific changes that would make the game better and the devs keep skirting around it, nerfing characters that don't need nerfs and buffing already good ones. it feels like there's a disconnect between what the players want and what the devs want for the game and it's confusing for the average player like myself

You know how nintendo was heavily criticized about how their recent mario sports games felt bare bones at launch and say that they stripped most of that content so they can extend the game's life with free content updates. That what this game feels like at the moment, with the combination of the really shitty practice of mtx in a full priced game. There's stuff i do really like with this game but right now it feels like it should've been marked as early access with how much it feels like there isn't much to do outside of online stuff.

Rivals of Aether 2 is a game for people who know how to play Rivals of Aether 2. "But Dr. Mistake" I hear you ask "How can someone play Rivals of Aether 2 if they don't already know how to play Rivals of Aether 2?" Please, call me Big. And to answer your question, I have no clue. I spent 10 hours trying to answer this question. I guess you just have to have either the resilience to bash your head against a wall until your head wins or a natural aptitude for the game. This game is currently in the midst of a nasty feedback loop where new players are thrown into a grinder the moment they enter the in-game matchmaking. This, in turn, chases off a large portion of new players. Those who use discord or steam forums to try and find other beginners will be met with crickets, because every other new player has already given up or ascended. So that feedback loop results in a game that can only sustain itself off of Melee players and those who've already learned the game. You see where the problem is, of course. This game cannot survive in its current state as anything other than an esport. Compare that to a game like Granblue Fantasy VS Rising. In Granblue, I can jump into online knowing only the very basics of my character and find people of equal skill level to play in matchmaking. My sticking point in trying to get the basics of Rivals 2 down was mental stack. Mental stack describes how many things you can keep in your head at once during a real fight. To compete, I needed my mental stack to juggle: Directional Influence, floor hugging, my enemy's tools, teching knockdowns, recovery, wave dashing, wave landing, knowing which tools are applicable in the current game state, a gameplan at low%, a different gameplan at medium%, and a few ways to secure a kill at high%. This is completely overwhelming. A player shouldn't have to lab 20 different mechanics for dozens of hours to have a chance against an average player. For fun, here are a few things I encountered in match making that made that experience even worse: Opponents taunting, opponents timer stalling, opponents just parry spamming, and opponents teabagging. Maybe the community as a whole isn't this toxic, but the players in matchmaking sure are. When I gave up on matchmaking, I spent 3 hours, went through 2 discord servers (One had 5k total members. Only 30-50 even had the Rivals 2 newbie role), and posted a steam discussion looking for a single other new player I could play with. I could not find one. Mind you, Rivals 2 had around 750 concurrent players at the time. This game should not be a discord fighter. A discord fighter usually sits at 200 or less players, and is stagnant on new players due to being old or niche. When I hit up the friend I bought Rivals 2 to play with, he just picked his main and smashed me. To me, this indicates the culture of Rivals 2 does not understand how to treat newer players. I know and like this guy. He's not a mean or toxic person. Rivals 2 as a game is not bad. It can actually be fun. I even had a little of it at points. Characters all have really creative, nuanced kits that you can potentially have thousands of hours of fun with. While other reviewers mention balance issues, I don't have the experience to speak to them here. However, the new player experience isn't just terrible, it is factors of magnitude worse than any other fighting game I've played. I've played a long list of fighting games. That's why it breaks my heart that I have to tell anyone without substantial platform fighter experience that you will very likely bounce off this game.

If this game ever becomes fun to me, I'll happily change my review to a positive one, but as it stands this is the most disappointment I've ever felt in a game, [i]especially[/i] a sequel in a franchise that I've loved and enjoyed for thousands of hours. I really, [i]really[/i] wanted to enjoy this game for thousands more, but there are far too many ever-prevalent reasons in the current state of the game as to why I can't after trying over and over to over the past 7 months. A lot of my feeling is "would you like to play a balanced game over a fun game?" and the feeling in my heart, to the dwindling playerbase, would be a resounding "absolutely not." But on top of that, the game is nowhere near a balanced state either, and the playerbase has been feeling that as patches go on. Every other balance update buffs top tier characters, and doles out endlag and makes other characters slower as a way to balance around the bloated and suffocating system mechanics. [i]It just isn't fun.[/i] I'm putting the big one up front before the pros and the [rest of the] cons, because this game is a blast when both players are new, but once you find the mid-level redpill, you can't go back. [h1]Floorhugging[/h1] If you've peeked around at other negative reviews, you might've seen this phrase pop up. Floorhugging as it's currently implemented in this game is easily the [b]least fun[/b] (and imo worst) mechanic I've ever experienced across any game ever barring literal P2W in pvp games. For those that don't know what it is, if you push down while you're getting attacked, you can shift yourself slightly downward and in turn you squish onto the floor, and you take significantly reduced hitstun than you would've otherwise. This mechanic exists in other platform fighter games (most notably Melee, and PM/P+), but not even remotely as offensive as it is currently in Rivals 2. In those games, it's used as a way to give low percent players multiple defensive options against low knockback moves from opponents, but in Rivals 2 for a strong portion of your time spent alive and onstage, it's used to mitigate a wide majority of moves in the game. The worst part about this mechanic is that there's no timing restrictions on when you're allowed to use it, so (for all the fighting gamers out there) you can throw out moves to your heart's content, all the while option selecting inputting down during all of them to cover yourself. To your opponent, there's no indicator that you're option selecting a floorhug until they try to hit you and then get punished for it because the amount of stun their move [i]HITTING[/i] you was less than the endlag of the move used was. Diehard high level players of this game will tell you there's plenty of counterplay, but it boils down to grabs, moves that spike, and usually strong/smash attacks, and most of the moves in your kit will slowly unlock their ability to not get you punished on hit, while some will also never ever not be punishable on hit if your opponent is on the ground. So what does this mean for the average low and mid level player? Your neutral interactions and whiff punishes that will be in your favor are going to be whiff punish with grab, dair or other spiking moves if your character is lucky enough to have multiple, or flicking your right stick in neutral and hoping for the best. For most people trying to improve at the game, [b]THIS IS NOT FUN TO DO[/b], and top players and the pilots behind the balancing updates on this game don't seem to understand this as the updates since launch have been doubling and tripling down on this mechanic. This mechanic was initially introduced to combat players spamming safe moves, and the result has been accidentally almost doubling the apm that you "should" be doing by masking a down input behind everything else you do so you can punish the other player for hitting you. If you refuse to engage with this mechanic, you're at a significant disadvantage to other mid level players. To accompany this ever-present mechanic, shielding is also incredibly strong, shieldgrab is strong, grabs will often feel like they're Melee Marth range, recoveries are strong, the ledge is strong, to top it off, parries from Rivals 1 are still in, and there's spotdodges and rolling too. Why are there [b]so[/b] many defensive mechanics? To me, the best (and only) course of action would be to remove floorhugging entirely as a start. It's not fun to do to someone else, it's not fun to get countered by. I've seen people respond to this by saying "but the game is balanced around it, you can't just remove a mechanic the game was built around because everything will be overpowered!" Well it sucks, I'm sorry, that's not the fault or responsibility of the playerbase. Players can only give their feedback, and it's up to the dev team to figure out solutions to make the game better. Since the game has launched, people have been complaining about how defensive, lame, boring, and frustrating it makes the game to play. You can say "the devs are allowed to make the game they want to make, it's their vision," and that's absolutely true. But please, look around at the multiple top level Smash players and streamer celebrities that got [i]PAID[/i] to play this game for the first year that've hopped off streaming it regularly (or even at all) because they're not enjoying the game overall, and this is just one piece of it. Almost everyone that I know that's tried the game has hopped off because it's not fun, small streamers that I've found have fallen out of love with the game over time as each balance patch is more and more tone-deaf to the outcries of the community that's bleeding smaller and smaller as time goes on. [h2]Pros[/h2] -some of the best-feeling platfighter movement [spoiler]even though it's laggier than Rivals 1 movement[/spoiler] -the art team members are killing it; visually the game's style looks great, especially the tons of variety of cool skins and costumes for characters that are gradually getting cranked out -small QoL sprinkled throughout the game like being able to invite other players to lobbies with codes that generate, a built-in RPS for a tournament mode best of 3 or 5 that you can enable, lots of control input customization options, a character playtest built into the character select screen, among other things [h2]Cons[/h2] -unfun gameplay once you start improving to mid level -no tutorials in the game at launch; new players still have to go outside of the game to learn how most mechanics or characters work -online server stability is variably bad -no built-in P2P to play with one other person in case of server issues -playerbase dwindling so 2v2 or free-for-all games are significantly harder to find (which make great use of the game's online servers to stabilize ping between players) as time goes on -menus are cumbersome (though this is slightly improving over time) -ui is sometimes buggy and can lag as well -training mode, while it has a lot of extremely useful options, still isn't good enough for the plethora of absurd and specific situations that players are asked to solve during games (this ties into the tutorials that aren't in the game yet) -monetization; skins and bundles are almost as expensive as the full game (you can earn any cosmetic ingame, albeit VERY slowly) -tone-deaf balance updates Initially when the game released over half a year ago, I told myself "maybe it'll be good in a year," but as things have been going, honestly the game almost feels like it's going in the opposite direction. At this rate, I think it might be 2 or 3 years if we're in a lucky timeline. Another 2000 word essay wouldn't be long enough to encapsulate how disappointed I feel about this game, but if you read all this, thanks and I'm sorry. I [i]really[/i] just wish this game was fun. For everyone that's still on the blue pill right now, I'm glad you're able to enjoy the game, but I don't have that hope left in me anymore.