Rivals of Aether II

Game is terribly optimized - loading times are horrendous. Options they display don't even work (Ex. In arcade LT + RT + Y = runback. No it doesn't. It just brings you to the game over screen anyway.) If you mess up in arcade and are trying to mash through, don't worry you can accidentally press B and ruin all your progress! It won't ask if you're sure - it's just gonna send you back to the character select and you can think about what you've done. Could complain about ranked but what's the point - just a scrub right? xd

Is not as fun as the first game. Feels like it lost what made the series a great addition to the platform fighter genre.

This game only rewards counterhitting. 90%+ of all interactions are won by mixing up shield, parry, spotdodge, and CC. Because most moves have 0 end lag after them, the defense was cranked up to 11 to compensate. Probably the worst fighting game I own, when movement, spacing, footsies and advantage barely matter at all.

never regretted spending my time playing this game until today, now all the sudden i wish i had never started. Do not buy this game, this game makes nobody's life better

Playing smash ultimate was like being in a toxic relationship, this game showed me the light

Roa2 is a HUGE step up compared to the first game, though i do understand some peoples problems with it. Roa1 is more close to a party game with friends due to the workshop and Roa2 is more close to a fighting game than anything, Roa2 is not a party like game its combat is vastly different from the firsts which sets them apart and doesn't completely take out Roa1 as Roa1 can still easily stand on its own due to everything it has. Again thin game is genuinely amazing and is worth picking up if you want a more fighting lean with Roa. The jump to 3d did turn me away massively but i have a really cool friend who got me to try it and oh my god I'm in love with this game, the art style for the game is really good but i understand that the jump isn't for everyone. There is microtransactions however they are really well done, things are decently cheap and you can earn a good amount of the premium currency just by playing its not like hd2 where you get very very little amount over a long time and gameplay options are restricted as far as i know everything is pretty much free sure it takes a little bit of time but it still fun if you aren't ruining your game by mindlessly grinding. But before this gets to long lol I'm gonna give a quick TLDR. -No gameplay locked behind paywall(map skins exist but i don't wanna talk about those :sob:) -Roa1 and Roa2 can coexist perfectly with no issues -Good combat (though little weird at times but that cause I'm bad lol) -Really good community -Good handling of microtransactions 9/10

Don't buy this based on the review score. I bought Rivals of Aether 2 and I'm still playing mainly because I'm already invested in the ecosystem. If I could undo the purchase and get my time and money back, I would. My problem isn't that the game is hard. It's that when I lose, the game does almost nothing to help me understand why, or what I should do differently. I'm 20 hours in and online still isn't fun—the enjoyment feels locked behind a wall of losses, and I have no sense of how much longer I'm supposed to push through before it opens up. A rough start would be easier to take if the offline content bridged the gap, but I don't think it does. The CPU AI feels weak and erratic, so it's not a satisfying way to practice. That leaves online as the main teacher, and matchmaking makes that harder than it needs to be. The playerbase isn't tiny—around 700 concurrent—but it feels like the overwhelming majority of the active base is experienced, which leaves newcomers spread very thin. I regularly get matched against players well above my rank, but the more telling part is that I lose badly even when the matchup looks fair. I get placed in bronze, get matched against another bronze player, and still get stomped. That points to smurfing or tanked placements: the matchmaker says we're peers; the match says otherwise. I'm not complaining about losing. I'm complaining that the ranking system doesn't give new players a space to practice with each other, and that losing doesn't teach me anything. The Steam page shows a positive score. My advice is to look at who is writing the reviews. A lot of them come from players with hundreds of hours in. That doesn't make them wrong, but they're describing a different game than the one you'll meet as a newcomer. Someone who bounced off and quit isn't as likely to write a review in the first place. The score tells you whether dedicated players end up loving this, but I'm not convinced it tells you much about your first 20 hours. Look at the recent reviews: they're "mixed" instead of "mostly positive." It's because new players don't get the same experience veterans do. What worries me most is where the devs are putting their effort. With newcomers this thin on the ground, the obvious problem is that they aren't sticking—and the reason they aren't is that the game doesn't teach them. But the devs' outline for their multi-year plan is to add something like fourteen more characters. A new character doesn't help someone who can't get a foothold in the first place. So I expect each one to land, fail to grow the base, and get followed by the next, on repeat—years of effort aimed at the roster when the actual barrier is onboarding. They're solving a problem the game doesn't have while the one it does goes untouched.

Great game! I enjoy the competitive nature of the game, but I waited for the fun for all update to leave a review because NOW there is a reason to actually play the game if you are a casual player. The casual mode is a ton of fun and it's great to get a few games in with friends where you're just screwing each other over on casual stages. As far as competitive goes, I do think there are SOME frustrating balance decisions in the game where some characters are clearly much stronger than others. I think most of the balance could be fixed by just adjusting the over-tuned characters for the most part. However, the game is pretty well-balanced for the most part. The game also has an open workshop beta! I think it's going to be great once they fully integrate it into the game, but at the time of this review it just crashes whenever I try to access it. Overall, I think this game is fantastic, and it has something for everyone!

Rivals of Aether 2 plays so good when u ain't got a rivals 1 player in ya ear telling you it's nasty