2XKO Impressions

Riot Games was always going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to win me over. I have never liked a single one of their games, I have zero investment in the characters or shared universe they’ve built off the back of League of Legends¹, and their long-awaited entry into the fighting game space has been marred by all the problems associated with a decade-long development cycle that included at least one full rewrite of the game concept, as well as the future problems associated with free to play monetisation that will undoubtedly cause the game to slide off my brain as if it were coated in teflon.

But more important than all of that is that the game now known as 2XKO would require me to install Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary kernel-level anti-cheat software. So when I took a beta code from a friend out of nothing but morbid curiosity, I knew I was going to be judging the game by one lone standard: I had to install a rootkit on my computer in order to play this game, so it had better impress me.

2XKO is… okay.

I can summarise 2XKO for you in a single image. Here it is.

Back in 2015, the brothers Tom and Tony Cannon, two of the main guys behind the Evolution Championship Series and inventors of the GGPO multiplayer networking library, made a free to play fighting game about super fighting robots called Rising Thunder. It was, in all ways that mattered, an exercise in iterating on Street Fighter IV. My friend Pichy wrote about the game back when it was first distributed - if you want the rundown, just go read her words about it. What’s important for our discussion here is that after the game was unceremoniously cancelled, having never made it out of public alpha testing, we eventually all came to learn that the reason for its cancellation was because the brothers had been hired by one Riot Games; the assumption was that Rising Thunder would be retooled or otherwise used as a base for a new fighting game to be published by the League of Legends company.

Fast-forward to September of 2025, and we now have an invite-only beta test for 2XKO, the game that the remains of Rising Thunder would eventually become. It is, in all ways that matter, an exercise in iterating on Rising Thunder.

That may sound kind of insane, considering that 2XKO is a tag team fighting game - a type of fighting game which I myself am a fan of, and have described as being one predicated on letting you do the most heinous shit the genre will allow - but playing 2XKO makes it very obvious that the design of Rising Thunder was used as a base; the control scheme is almost the exact same, featuring three attack buttons, two special move buttons and a “Team” button (where the third special move button would be in Rising Thunder, go figure), and the way normal attacks are structured is also largely the same, with every character having a dedicated anti-air on 2H and a dedicated cross-up normal on j.2H.

Of course, it’d be disingenuous of me to suggest that the game is just tag team Rising Thunder with League of Legends characters, because it’s not. Compared to its predecessor, 2XKO has a much more expansive combo system, more involved defensive mechanics, a few unique movement options scattered throughout the cast, and a lightly customisable team play system held together by the all-important “Handshake Tag” mechanic, which lets you cancel any assist call into a tag. Which was, of course, pioneered by BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and perfected by Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid - and it’s the latter game that the Handshake Tag mechanic is clearly inspired by, which is hardly surprising given that Riot Games somehow managed to draft Daniel “Clockw0rk” Maniago, the lead director for the first season of Battle for the Grid, onto the dev team for this game, too.

So we have a fighting game whose bones are based on a game the developers already created, and most of its mechanical decisions are explicitly inspired by other games the developers have played - or, in fact, also created. While it does do a couple of noteworthy things with the tag team formula - primarily operating on a first-to-two rounds system where both characters still must be eliminated, as well as allowing defeated characters to still be used as assists - the game’s unique features aren’t enough to distract me from the fact that playing this game gave me a very distinct feeling: this game is nothing I haven’t played before.

I spent my time in the beta playing a team of Ahri and Vi, because Ahri has an air dash and Vi has a pillar assist, which meant that if I closed my eyes I could pretend that I was playing Storm/Captain Commando. Multiple long sets with both friends and strangers felt like I was just going through the motions, because the game itself feels like it’s just kind of going through the motions - it feels like everything that it’s clearly taking inspiration from, with nothing in the way of unique contributions or even novel recontextualisations of the ideas it’s borrowing. It’s not bad or broken, nothing struck me as overly strong or weak or difficult to utilise, and it didn’t feel as though it was actively disrespecting my intelligence. 2XKO is perhaps the single most inoffensive fighting game I have ever played - which is precisely the problem.

I dunno, man. This isn’t my usual “new game bad, old game good” schtick. It’s a game clearly made by people who like fighting games and are putting a lot of thought into how to make a fighting game. But I think 2XKO’s biggest weakness is thinking a little too hard about how to make a fighting game, because it gets so lost in thought about all the ideas from other games it wants to fix or iterate on that it forgets to have any ideas of its own. Its mechanics are all hand-picked from other fighting games with light tweaks, and its current cast of characters seem to exist more to fill standard fighting game archetypes than actually draw on some of the frankly wild designs Riot has thrown into League of Legends over the past way too many years the game has existed. 2XKO is the most inoffensive fighting game I’ve ever played, but that’s because it’s the most derivative fighting game I’ve ever played. It doesn’t give me any reason to play it over any of the games it’s basing itself on other than the existence of a big shiny “play” button in the top left corner and a matchmaking queue with people in it.²

But maybe that’s enough. Everyone’s getting their lunch eaten by Marvel Tokon³ anyway, so if 2XKO is just a readily-accessible fighting game that lets you team up with a friend and beat people up with your favourite League of Legends waifu, like. Y’know. You can do a hell of a lot worse. You kids have fun, I’ll just be over here playing Virtua Fighter 5.