Review written from the perspective of a midcore fighting game enjoyer. I rarely go to locals but enjoy learning fighting games to a proficient level.
I could summarise my thoughts on this game with 2 points: it's HARD, and EVERYONE has SAUCE. If you're interested, This period (July-August 2026) just after release is gonna be the best time to jump into the game because there isn't a defined meta yet. Even the top players are still learning the characters and figuring out what works. If you find a player that's really good on their character, there's a good chance that they haven't yet spent the time to learn what YOUR character does, so spend some time in training to pick up your character's gameplan and kick some ass. The devs have already committed to improving the visuals on lacking characters, so some of the louder complaints from the community I've seen are already being addressed.
Going into this game I wasn't in love with the visuals. The UI, menus and some characters are clearly missing polish and juice, and the dash button is a *macro*, not a dedicated button so it will come out as a special move input if you put in motion inputs while dashing (this definitely is not 2XKO). However I was very pleasantly surprised by how crazy fun the game is once you've picked up the basics. The game has elements of anime fighters and marvel vs capcom in the combo structure, Smash bros with the tech roll and spot-dodge mechanic for most characters, street fighter with the flow stance's auto-parry, and more i'm definitely missing. there's a lot of mechanics here to add layers to all of your interactions with the opponent.
For example, tech rolls and air recovery stop you from being locked in the corner for the entire match. This means the match is unlikely to be over in one interaction unless your opponent predicts your getup option. then. you're screwed. UNLESS you use the special recovery option which costs your flow meter and launches you back to a safe neutral position. So there are good number of options you have to recover, thus the game never ends up feeling like Street Fighter 6 where you can end up eating back-to-back strike/throw mix in the corner for a whole round.
After a few online games of floundering on katara, I ended up sinking 4 hours into a training mode session where the game really fell into place for me. I pieced together my own set of BNB combos and figured out the character's basic gameplan. Katara has easy and effective basic mixups and obnoxious fullscreen pressure but also stance cancel shenanigans, pressure resets, crossups, difficult combos and setplay you'll need to learn to deal with better opponents. The easy parts of the character let me take lots of wins on my first day while I slowly built the muscle memory to even start executing her combos. And that's just the variant of katara that I play. If you pick either of her 2 other modes or "supports", you're going to be prioritising and learning different parts of her kit. 13 hours in, I feel confident in saying the gameplay and learning curve is excellent and I would highly recommend this game based on that alone.
I haven't played the story mode or single player modes and don't intend to for a while. You can instantly unlock the two secret characters with a cheat code hidden in the menus which is very nice from the devs.
On release, there's no ranked mode. Queuing online you're likely to play against someone who just installed the game and then someone on their 30th hour immediately after. Personally I think this is a good choice on release, because unranked mode doesn't cap the number of rematches. You and the opponent can keep rematching, adapting to each other and having more satisfying sets.
Overall a strong recommend for fighting game enjoyers; if you're a casual this game is quite execution heavy, but now is the perfect time to jump in and try because everyone is figuring the game out together.
The real Avatar was the combos we dropped along the way.
