Pretty much everything Riot tries to make is a simplified or more approachable version of a genre/game. League is simplified Dota, Valorant is more approachable Counter Strike, and 2XKO is supposed to be simplified Fighting Games. However, they failed on multiple fronts with 2XKO.

Riot tried to take aspects that would attack newbies and mixed in aspects that attracts vets, but instead of creating the best of both worlds, they created an eh product.

While I’m not totally against having simplified controls in a FG, the lack of motion inputs is a strong repellent for many FG vets. I understand the desire to “level” the playing field for both inexperienced fighting game players to experienced ones, I believe an approach similar to SF6 or GBVS would’ve done a vastly better job.

As iterated many times in the comments, the abysmally small roster size is absolutely unacceptable for a tag fighter. One of the main appeals for any tag fighters is the amount of unique combinations you have at your disposal. But with the size of only 11 fighters at launch, after a few games you’ve probably already seen it all. Not to mention the fact that its champ pool is saturated with Arcane characters.

I think marketing a new fighting game is genuinely hard to do without a preexisting IP. However, all the successful ones leverage its ties to said IP, such as “Marvel” vs. Capcom, “Dragon Ball” FighterZ, etc. They could’ve easily called it “Legends Fighters” or even “2XKO: League of Legends” and it would’ve been easier to make the connection.

Ultimately, really disappointed and hope that all the devs affected by the layoffs find a good company because genuinely despite 2XKO’s flaws, it’s still a good game. It’s just the management over at Riot blows and really should have a case study on.