My Honest Thoughts on the 2XKO Closed Beta

Hello everybody and welcome to another game review on Out of Games. This one’s a bit of a doozy because the game’s not even officially out to the public yet. This time, we’re looking at 2XKO off the back of going into its closed beta on September 9th, and it turns out that I actually lied when I said that I didn’t get in because I actually ended up getting into the beta three days later. I had to take it upon myself to give you all a proper review of the beta.

2XKO is a fighting game made by Riot Games, taking place in the League of Legends universe, using the characters from everyone's favorite MOBA. So while the game is still in beta, let us see what Riot has whipped up in the arena.

Important note: The game is currently in beta at the time of this review, meaning that certain aspects of the game as documented in the review are subject to change. This doesn’t mean that the game is immune from criticism, but it means that you have to read everything knowing that it’s still being developed.

Easy to Play...

The first thing I noticed about 2XKO was how easy it was to run and play. Even on my 5-year old laptop that is still mostly factory-spec, the game ran buttery smooth for 99% of my play time with the game. If you have any machine made in the past 5 years or perhaps even slightly older, there’s a very good chance that you'll be able to play this game just fine. This is wonderful for accessibility, and I applaud Riot for keeping the game unintensive to run.

2XKO uses a very simplified control scheme where you don’t need motion inputs on your control stick to perform certain special moves. Instead you just need to hit one directional button and one dedicated special button and you’ll perform a “spicier” move than your basic light, medium, and heavy attack. There is a lot of resentment from classic fighting game fans towards more and more fighting games leaning towards this control scheme. So much so that the upcoming Invisible VS fighting game eventually caved in and added motion inputs after so much criticism for not having them.

From the perspective of someone who only ever plays fighting games casually, my take on the matter is that this really isn’t a big deal. Are motion inputs more “skill intensive” than a simple directional input? Maybe so, but there is also a lot of appeal to being able to pull out a special move with a simple button combination as opposed to “rotate the left stick exactly 58.469 degrees to the left and move it exactly 26.7 millimeters to the right in exactly 0.6534758 seconds while the moon is exactly 78.48590% full at 3:12:56PM on a February 29th solar eclipse.”

Even if you think it’s not as skill intensive to use direction inputs, I think it is also important that there are different types of fighting game controls for the sake of appealing to other players. I’m perfectly fine with lowering the skill floor and not confining myself to the “get good, scrub!” attitude that you might encounter otherwise. If you love this type of control scheme, then that’s great. If you prefer motion inputs, then that’s also great. At the end of the day, we’re all here because we shared an interest in the fighting game genre and wanted to see Riot’s take on it.

If you have any knowledge of fighting game 101, you can pick up 2XKO and get the hang of it right away. But while the game is simple on the surface, there’s a huge dynamic in the game to talk about.

... Hard to Master

As the name would suggest, 2XKO is a game about fighting in teams of two (meant to be a funny way of saying “Double Knockout”). In most fighting games, the 2v2 mode may unlock a special tag move to perform or might come with a couple of interactions, but for the most part, 2v2 modes mostly come down to being a second health bar for the other player to take out.

In 2XKO, that is not the case. Riot recognized how much design space there was around what you could do with two characters and built around that. In this game, the second character and how they can interact with the battlefield even when they aren’t the active character, are both very important. There are five different types of “fuses” you can play as when determining your strategy with your team:

• 2X Assist lets you call in your other character for two assist attacks before they retreat.

• Double Down lets you combine the super moves of both of your characters to perform them almost simultaneously. This also allows you to tag into your other character while the first character is performing a super move, and freely keep the combo going.

• Freestyle lets you tag twice within the same sequence, allowing you to start a combo with one character, tag in the other character to get some hits in, then tag back into the original character to keep the combo moving, giving you a lot of possibilities for chaining.

• Juggernaut lets you play solely with one character with extra health, extra strength, and a move that forces your opponent to swap to their other character. If you would rather not need to learn and practice with two different move sets, this is the style for you.

• Sidekick is basically a support class incarnated as a fighting game style. It allows you to play with one character, like Juggernaut, but your teammate can still help with assist maneuvers from the sidelines

This is a very innovative system with a lot of depth that perfectly falls into the category of “easy to learn, hard to master”. As much as that phrase tends to get thrown around haphazardly when describing games, it is actually quite true in the case of 2XKO. If you thought that the game was going to be “braindead” to play due to the lack of motion inputs, this extremely in-depth and flexible team combat system offsets all of that. Your character combination carries a lot of depth because of the way certain special moves can chain into your other character’s special moves. There are tons of ways to chain the moves of both of your characters into one combo. You can experiment endless with a lot of different character combinations and “fuse” styles to find what style works perfectly for you. This also means that the competitive meta will likely be full of diverse options that will be viable for ranking up.

Additionally, when your other character loses all of their health, they don’t “die” per se. You can still perform assists and “Breaks” with them as normal, so both characters will always be in play to some extent for the entirety of the game. Instead, when one character loses all their health, your active character will be able to activate “Fury” mode, giving you extra damage, damage resistance, and some extra moves to enable new combo strategies.

Due to the fact that both members of your team are always contributing to the fight at any given time, this makes it a very great system for co-op play because you will always be affecting the outcome of the fight even if you never get to be the “main” character in it.

Beta Bruises

But while the controls make the game very easy to pick up and play, I found the execution of some of the tutorial modes to be a bit questionable. The game’s dedicated tutorial section is actually really helpful in teaching you all of the nuances of how the game’s mechanics work. At some stages, you’ll be asked to use various techniques you learned against an AI bot. This is a great idea, but the execution falls flat because your health doesn’t regenerate on its own in these stages meaning that this comes off as more of a checklist to complete before you meet your untimely death rather than actually learning how to incorporate these moves into a proper fight. Due to the lack of a “combo trials” mode, it’s also hard to properly learn how to combo with each character. I realize it’s still in beta and all, but with only nine characters, I seriously doubt that it would’ve taken that long to make a combo trials mode for each of them.

My biggest problem with the game though is the lack of a dedicated arcade mode. I’m chalking this up to the fact that the game has a very tiny roster of characters at the moment, and Riot probably wanted to focus on the more important aspect of the game, which is the online matchmaking. Still, it feels very odd to me to play a fighting game with no arcade mode. Riot games have always been predominantly multiplayer, but they have proven to be able to make good single-player experiences too. Nowadays, Legends of Runeterra is often played solely as a roguelike deckbuilder. I believe that Riot would be able to add a good arcade mode to 2XKO, and I firmly believe that it would improve the longevity of the game and catch a wider audience.

Final Words

2XKO is, visually speaking, a very gorgeous game. The cel-shaded art style is pleasing to look at, and the way the game’s visual effects are spectacular to look at, and any of them related to status effects (like Darius’s “bleed” status he can inflict) are visually communicated beautifully to where you can know exactly what they mean even if you never played the tutorial that tells you. In typical Riot fashion, there’s also a lot of skins that you can unlock for each character. You can buy titles and plates and all that stuff, just like you would in something like Street Fighter. You do need to do this to unlock characters too, which I think is a little bit weird, but a really cool thing is that you can play locked characters in offline modes with all of the skins unlocked. Yet another reason that an arcade mode would be fantastic.

I can’t really speak much about the balance of the characters relative to other characters, but each character feels fun to play and adds their own way to play the game. I realize this isn’t much to say when the game has only nine characters to pick from, but if the starting roster is going to be that small, then Riot definitely did a good job of covering their bases and making sure all nine characters feel good to play with, while feeling distinct. Despite the small roster, your playstyle is also extremely customizable due to the number of team-up synergies and fuses, effectively making one combination of characters count as 4.

Overall, 2XKO is a very fun and competent fighting game that I expect to hold its own weight. If nothing else, if it doesn’t become a mega-star, it’ll always have a diehard niche audience that continues to support the game. If you’re a fan of fighting games, even if you’ve never played League of Legends in your life, then 2XKO is another game to add to that list of good fighting games. It’s missing a few things (extra characters, arcade mode, etc.), but I reckon all of those will be added shortly after the game’s proper full release.

Are you playing the 2XKO closed beta? What do you think of the game? Let us know in the comments below.