Rivals 2 Steam Charts & Stats

DONT GET THIS GAME IF YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR SANITY, good game but not if you havent played smash. barrier to entry is so fkn high jesus christ

Character balance feels generally pretty awful and the servers just don't work so online is basically unplayable

i like this game i dont get the comments alot of them scream i just bought the game and went into online play. now if you go online the moment you pick up the game. your guna have a bad time. its like if you pizza when your suppose to french fry. your guna have a bad time. now there are tutorials. idk what they mean by there are none there are plenty. not to mention a nice arcade style single player mode that id suggest you play before touching online now i wish the game didnt really turn into a skin grab kinda game or edleast you could earn the premium currency better and faster since the game is -cough cough- 30 bucks normally. but i like the combat and movement and the nice combos you can do they really brought it to life its also well balanced. so you got quite alot here not to mention the characters look nice and play quite well to its really fun once you get the flow and each character is like got there own kinda flow to them and once you get it you get it and it feels amazing and i really recommend this game if you got some friends to screw around with start out with some friends have a blast learn together have a good time

it is a somewhat fun game but with there being almost no way for a brand new person to actually play the game against someone and have fun. It ruins the game that casual is the least casual thing ever and full of sweats even in beginner play. Even in ranked the game takes forever for lobbies and i have my ping set pretty far out so its not a small search area its a lot of waiting and almost no reward for playing the game.

This game is not made or balanced for you, it is made for Dan Fornace and the top 10 tourney players.

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, loose to something different, discover the skill issue, improve, loose, and repeat.

This game's falloff needs to be studied. And no this isn't just a case of "other games come out so it's hard to retain playerbase" that is only a part of it. It takes up to 30 minutes to find a match in the 2v2 queue sometimes. Obviously launch popularity isn't going to last forever, but a lot of bizarre balance decisions accompanied with the larger system changes which dropped the unique identity of Rivals 1 in favor of trying to grab Smash's market share (which is impossible to do without Nintendos IP/Brand Recognition anyway) has hurt the game more than it has helped. Sure, the game looks FANTASTIC, huge shoutouts to the art team, and the music is again absolutely incredible, following up on a lot of motifs from previous games and expanding upon them. The whole presentation is sick. But the game itself? Insanely frustrating to play in multiple ways, some matchups feel like putting your hand in a blender, and they keep buffing Zetterburn stop doing that!!!!?? But fr someone get on dubs, dubs still fun as fuck (most of the time, anyway)

This game's so good. Very crisp gameplay, great moveset and "gimmicks" on the characters. Solid dev support, getting detailed patch notes and frequent balance patches. And speaking of balance, the game is very well balanced, sure there are gaps between some characters, but if you look at it, the gaps are small in comparison to other games, every character is very good. Not a super fan of microtransactions in general, however, the devs are very transparent about it, and also make sure that only non-essentials like skins are monetized, all oncoming characters are free so you can fully enjoy the gameplay without issues. Rollback netcode (not perfect, but a big improvement from the delay based code from Smash) and solid ranked matchmaking. The server service does need some work, but it's steadily improving and already works well enough. Newcomers beware though, you will be steamrolled for quite a while if you're not too experienced with platform fighters, specially games like Melee. If you don't enjoy the excruciating first phases, it will be rough for you, and you will need to research because of the lack of tutorials (more expansive tutorials are on the way, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still a big issue for newcomers). Overall, the best option for a platform fighter imho.

after 200 hours i can safely say that this is a horribly balanced plat fighter that came out wayyyy too early for its own good. they release "balance" patches every 2 weeks or so that serve to tone down characters who are generally better than others, of which the only ones that they have been successful with are wrastor, and fleet, who they absolutely nuked the patch after she was busted. speaking of patches, it feels like every patch the game becomes... worse? like it objectively becomes worse. the netcode, the random ass bugs they seem to introduce every patch, the menu lags now for some reason? this game has a ton of great potential, but the devs dont really seem to take much feedback, weird for an indie project. maybe in the future rivals 2 will blossom into a game with a well balanced cast characters, the charm that the first game has, and more content in general, but for now i genuinely cannot recommend this game, especially at its asking price of 30 dollars.

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.