Early Access game in all but name. Missing critical features on launch that were promised, generally a step back from it's predecessor. Bloated with mechanics trying to imitate Super Smash Bros. Melee, but missing the point and overtuning the mechanics HARD.
One example is Floor Hugging. In this game you can tap a direction while being hit to shift yourself over a little bit. This isn't bad on it's own, but there's a catch. If you tap into the ground using this mechanic, you can cancel the knockback and stun you would take, effectively nullifying an opponent's "successful" attack entirely. Not only that, but you get a free punish on the opponent for performing this technique. This can be combined with another tech called "Crouch Cancelling" that reduces knockback by 30% if you take a hit while crouching. These combined make it so if you attack an opponent all they have to do is press down while or before getting hit to instantly turn the tables on you, for free, for attacks of almost any level of power. This encourages a standoffish approach to fights where it's almost always bad to attack the opponent unless using a grab.
There's another imitation mechanic from Melee where you can hold onto a ledge to prevent another player from using it. This is fine as well, it's relatively difficult to time holding the ledge to stop a powerful recovery move from reaching it so when you do pull it off you get well rewarded by ending an opponent's stock. The issue is that they decided to port a behavioral quirk where rolling from ledge keeps it occupied. This means visually the ledge can be completely open for up to a second while your recovering character just "decides" not to grab it. this can also happen with attacks off ledge and sometimes the characters just "don't reach" when their arms can easily reach the ledge.
This game also has a barrier shield that covers the whole character, it never shrinks and can only be beaten by either shattering it with enough damage, or a grab. The issue is that many characters in this game do not have a safe way to attack the shield, while other characters have easy, fast attacks that can be thrown at a shield safely and indefinitely. This creates an imbalance where a small portion of the cast doesn't interact with the game's mechanics while others are smothered by them. The shield, Crouch Cancel, and Floorhugging promote an incredibly safe and campy playstyle where nobody feels like approaching at risk of getting punished for a hit, and where landing a hit is dependent on if you have one of the 7 Safe Moves of Heavenly Virtue.
The game heavily favors good grabs, highly mobile recoveries with large hitboxes to protect them, and safe aerial attacks to beat the oppressive Floorhugging when combined with shields. The original game did not have floorhugging, shields, or a ledge and as this is effectively an Early Access game without saying it is, I can forgive some balance issues. The issue is that I can't recommend a game where it's broken on such fundamental levels in it's design, since that often speaks to a deeper issue with design philosophy.

Speaking of which, some characters don't feel like they're in the same game. The frog character Ranno and the Sword user Clairen both have incredibly forgiving and sometimes downright overcentralizing moves that either protect the user from mistakes freely, or diminish the other available tools in their kit with just how powerful the single move is. Other characters can't catch a break in terms of their ability to fight against the system mechanics or powerful characters. Forsburn and Etalus both embody different parts of this problem.
Forsburn features generally slower moves with longer recovery than other heavier or longer range characters like Loxodont, and the standout mechanics that he has have been nerfed and tweaked to be less effective than just swinging around a few strong moves. His best tools get nerfed, leading him to feel less like a tricky smoke and mirrors character and forcing him into a more mundane bait and punish hybrid sword character.
Etalus on the other hand feels unable to keep up due to a lack of good tools to get opponents away or deal with disjounts. He feels right out of rivals 1, which on the one hand is good but on the other hand means he has more trouble interfacing with this game's mechanics. He often gets completely drowned out by fast moving characters and disjoints while not being able to handle the powerful Floorhugs and Shields as well due to a generally lower speed and stubbier moves.
Overcentralizing kits, lost design direction, and characters being held down by system mechanics with tools that mean less and less. They lose identity due the direction this game is headed, and for that I also cannot recommend this game.

Finally I want to talk about Singleplayer content, and quality of life features.
For quality of life, many control options from the original are regressed. One example is the deadzone selector for the stick. It's not as robust, there's no stick visualizer, and the options afaik dont apply at all to the right stick. The increase in buttons also means shorthop and run buttons don't have room unless you're getting into more complicated control schemes or foregoing parts of the default control, and with such poor deadzone settings a run button or walk button is required to get better control.

Singleplayer is entirely missing it's Story and Abyss modes, only having a weak Classic Mode that effectively acts as a cpu enemy gauntlet. Story is rough, big rough. Abyss Mode in R1 was pretty cool, as it let you unlock custom moves and skins, and featured alternative challenges and boss fights as opposed to just fighting CPU bots. These missing features are supposed to come out later in the lifecycle, but with little to no singleplayer replayability or even basic singleplayer playability at all, it's a major step back from Rivals 1, and I can't recommend it for that either.

All in all the game has a lot of fixable issues, but the direction it's moved in has me worried that the design philosophy for the game is fundamentally flawed. Until a good majority of issues are fixed with this game, I cannot recommend purchasing it.

my friends keep holding down when i hit them please patch this

I am going to say that after sinking a good amount of time into this game as well as running offline tournaments for my local scene, I think the game is SO CLOSE to being good. But it can only be "so close" for so long. I personally do not like this game, but I do think it is a good game; hence why I don't really want to give it a negative review. I think if you're coming from Ultimate, PM/P+ or Melee it's a great game. That being said, I have a TON of deep frustrations with it.

I REALLY want this game to succeed; I think it actually has a lot going for it especially if you're coming from Ultimate or PM; Solid mechanics, a BS yet fun roster of characters, and a dev team that supports the competitive scene. These are all things that are really nice to have in a platforn fighter. With a promising future ahead and the dev team keeping a lot of their promises with more content to come, I'll be keeping an eye on this game's future.

HOWEVER

Coming from having nearly 1k hours on RoA1, this just feels like a letdown to me. It completely shafted the identity of the original game save for hitfalling and the characters. I understand that the idea was to appeal to all platform fighter communities; that's great! That's a good thing to do. However, it is EXTREMELY difficult, and despite the talent of the dev team, that difficulty shows here in dividends. It feels like a bunch of foreign mechanics were put together and they did their damndest to make them work and unfortunately they just don't. The thing that frustrates me the most is the addition of shields and ledges, but not in the way you may assume. I am totally fine with shields and ledges; I come from Smash Ultimate, I'm used to that being a mechanic. However, those characters were designed with shields in mind. Rivals characters were not. As a result, playing around shields just feels weird and foreign for a lot of these characters, except really for Lox and Fleet. Honestly, the shields aren't even the bad part though; the ledge feels ATROCIOUS. Free edgeguarding by just grabbing the ledge and dropping with an aerial, getting your walljump back when you hit someone makes it impossible to recover against a good few characters if you're forced to go low, and most getup attacks being HUGE is also pretty annoying, though that's more a skill issue on my part.

PLEASE GOD ADD WHIFFLAG BACK. So many characters can just mash aerials at you and boom you can't do anything about it. The general safety on shield in this game is absurd because so many characters lack a solid out of shield option so just fullhopping and mashing an aerial is something that I've had go completely unpunished even in high platinum/low diamond, against players that really should be able to punish that.

There are so many ways to be punished for hitting your opponent in this game it's absurd. I have no issue with crouch cancelling as a mechanics but it is absolutely not okay in the current state it's in. So many neutral exchanges just boil down to hit -> cc counterhit tilt -> cc counterhit tilt -> so on and so forth and it's just whoever has the fastest mashable combo starter wins eventually I guess? Idk it's so frustrating. Positioning myself to score a hit and then being punished for hitting my opponent will never feel good in any capacity regardless of how much of a "skill issue" it might be.

So many of the characters in this game feel simply lobotimized from their prior incarnations. I dropped Forsburn in this game despite RoA1 Forsburn being my favorite fighting game character EVER, platfighter or traditional fighter. It just feels terrible to not feel like I'm able to express with my character in the way that I'm used to, his gameplan got so simplified and he feels so painful to play while also being filthy broken. The closest character to RoA1 I feel I have in this game is Etalus and don't even get me STARTED on how tragic his port to RoA2 was. I know the team at Aether Studios was so adamant about "Guys it's not Rivals 1 it's its own game!" but in trying to make something different they made something that makes me feel homesick.

Alright, rant over. Game is so damn close to being good but I'm starting to lose faith after like 5 patches straight of "It's so close guys!".