I've been in the closed beta tests since much earlier in the year, so my time played is well over 100 hours as of writing. I gave it several patches and enough time to make sure I understood what direction it was going and that I was reasonably good at the game. The first 50 hours or so boil down to memorizing all the tedious knowledge checks, so it's fair to say you can't know how the game works until you reach that point. Taken as a whole, it's simply not very fun relative to other platform fighters.

You have a couple of buttons you can use until higher percents because base knockback values are bafflingly low across the board and SDI down is still strong. Advantage boils down to a handful of easy confirms. Because the skill floor is so high and getting your main confirms is so trivial, virtually nothing is impressive and the same things happen over and over. I have played people of every skill level now and it's all the same. When I win, it doesn't feel earned. When I lose, it doesn't feel earned. So many interactions boil down to a coin flip.

Neutral is mostly reduced to fishing for counter-hits or shield grabs out of floor hugging. A few characters have goofy win conditions reminiscent of Smash 4 up-throw > up-air. Other characters just have stray hits that kill very early. For many characters, sour spots combo into themselves, so it doesn't really matter if you aim as long as you keep mashing. This was a problem in Rivals 1, but it feels much worse in Rivals 2. Nearly every strong hit can also send you backwards, so even DI is another coin flip.

Edgeguarding is possible as some characters playing against some characters, but it's by far the weakest and least consequential it's ever been in any game I've played. This means that unless you're playing Fleet, almost every win condition goes back to your 1 or 2 basic confirms.

Orcane went from being my favorite character in Rivals 1 to my least favorite in Rivals 2. My orcane is level 150 purely because I have been desperate to be proven wrong and to derive some morsel of enjoyment. When I think about how little fun it is now and how all the really tedious characters are still yet to come, I am filled with despair. It's a hard pill to swallow, since I helped fund the project and was eager to get invested. For my money, the most disappointing sequel since Torchlight 3.

Ultimately it's not for me, but it's a damn good game. They took Rivals and moved it HARD in the direction of smash. In the process they abandoned a lot of the specific things that made Rivals special for me. But if you're looking for a plat fighter that doesn't have terribly demanding techskill and plays a lot like PM but without nintendo looming over you, this is a damn good game.

I really hate to give a negative review of this game because I really want to like it.

If you've been playing melee for 23 years then this is the game for you! But if you aren't already competing in platform fighter tournaments though, maybe steer clear of the online. I was a rivals 1 player for years and I'm able to consistently 0 to stock the level 9 cpus in this game, but in the 8 and a half hours i have in this game there is not 1 online victory in there, but there were many 0 to stocks performed on me. Sure, maybe I'm just bad. but if my only choices are easily beating the hardest cpus or getting creamed like i've never touched a controller, then the rest of the gameplay is just practicing to hopefully be just good enough to have a chance at enjoying the online.

Looks gorgeous though!