2XKO Review

As strange as this might sound, 2XKO is somehow one of the best entry points into the fighting game genre I’ve seen despite simultaneously being the hardest 2D fighter I’ve ever made an earnest attempt to get good at. This 2v2 tag fighter set in the world of League of Legends opens its arms to inexperienced players with a free-to-play pricing model, simple special move inputs, a unique duo play option that lets you team up with a more experienced friend, and optional single-button auto-combos that do respectable damage. But once you take the training wheels off, that approachability is accompanied by some of the grimiest mix-ups I've ever seen, powerful characters that can delete your health bar by capitalizing on a single mistake, and technically demanding combos that are required to truly unlock your damage potential. It’s a sense of power that can be thrilling to harness and harrowing when it gets wielded against you. The ultimate result is a game that hits that sweet spot of being easy to pick up, difficult to master, and highly enjoyable no matter your skill level.

There’s a whole lot to unpack, so let’s start with 2XKO’s focus on simple controls. Unlike most fighting games that at least offer the option to use motion-based command inputs for special moves (like those dating back to the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet days), 2XKO simplifies all of its specials and super moves to single or simultaneous two-button presses. So instead of doing a quarter-circle-forward motion for a fireball, all you have to do is press the S1 button; If you wanna do a super, you press an attack button and one of the special buttons at the same time; and if you want to do your ultimate attack, you press both special buttons at the same time.

This is a double-edged sword, because while it does make it a little easier for a complete newcomer who has trouble with quarter-circle or Dragon Punch inputs, it also turns what should be a four-button game – with light, medium, and heavy attack buttons, plus a tag button – into a six-button game, at minimum. Most people will want to bind dash and parry to a single button press as well, putting every single button on a standard controller to work.

As a result, I’ve felt my hands getting lost on my controller in 2XKO moreso than any other fighting game I’ve played as my brain races to parse which special move is tied to which special button, and which direction I have to hold to use it. It’s a learning curve that I was eventually able to overcome, but one that nonetheless made me yearn for a classic/modern control scheme split like what Street Fighter 6 uses.

The second big thing is that 2XKO uses an active tag system much like what’s in BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle or Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid. The idea is that you pick two characters before the match, each of which has assist moves they can be called in to execute when they are not the active fighter, and they’ll remain in a pose for a few seconds after they finish those moves before retreating back off screen. At any point while the assist character is on screen, you can press the tag button to swap control to them. This opens the door for potential tricky mix-up opportunities, especially when you’re able to sandwich your target between your assist and active characters.

That system works incredibly well here in 2XKO, especially since so many of the characters have special moves that seem designed specifically around it. Vi and Ekko, for instance, both have specials that allow them to cross to the other side of their opponent, with the downside being that they are typically punishable. But if you cover them with an assist, not only do you make the crossover safe, but you get a free left/right mix-up opportunity by swapping to the other character. This is just the tip of a massive iceberg though, and once you start digging deep into the tech of some of these characters, you’ll find some absolutely dirty stuff you can do to your opponent.

Powerful offensive mechanics often demand powerful defensive mechanics, and fortunately 2XKO gives the defender plenty of options to avoid getting run over without the opportunity for any interactability. If you’re blocking, you can press the light and medium attack buttons to do a retreating guard which pushes your character away from the attacker and potentially creates some space to let you escape their pressure. This doesn’t require a resource, but you need to be careful about abusing it, as the attacker can scout it out and punish it with a throw or a low attack.

More powerful are pushblocks, which push the opponent away instead of moving yourself backwards, potentially giving the defender an opportunity to punish the attacker’s whiffed attack. The added defensive utility here is balanced by using up your assist and putting it on a four-second cooldown, twice as long as a normal assist.

Then there are parries that can punish foes who are being too predictable with their block strings, universal wake up attacks that can punish aggression when you’re knocked down, and wake up rolls that can put some crucial distance between you and your opponents, or allow you to escape the corner. All of these of course have counters, requiring a good read or reaction on just about every interaction. Despite the overwhelming power of offense in 2XKO, the huge arsenal of universal defensive techniques make it feel like I always have a way to disrupt a predictable offense pattern and at least give myself another chance to play.

Then there are the Fuses. Much like Grooves in the Capcom vs SNK series, Fuses are an extra little bonus you take into a match that allow you to break one of the established rules. For example, once you use your super, your combo is typically over – but with the Double Down Fuse, you can do a super then tag in your partner character for them to do their super to add on extra damage, and even switch characters as part of the deal. You are normally only allowed one active tag per assist call, but with the Freestyle Fuse you can call in your assist, active tag to them, do a couple of hits, and then active tag again back to the first character. These Fuses can totally change your approach to how you use your team and spend your meter, and experimenting with each to try and find which one fits my playstyle and my team best has been a lot of fun.

If you don’t want to learn two characters and instead just want to focus on one, there are also two Fuses that allow you to do just that. Juggernaut and Sidekick both have you playing as only one character with just one life bar, but to make up for that they have increased health, higher defense, start with two bars of super instead of one, and can have a maximum of five bars of super instead of three.

Juggernaut also has the added advantage of being able to forcibly swap an opponent’s character to focus on the one with less health and prevent them from regaining gray life, while Sidekick gives you the ability to reduce the amount of damage you take by timing button presses with enemy attacks. You can also charge up your assist moves by holding down the tag button, letting them travel a distance before actually committing to their attack. You do lose the ability to do active tags, which is one of the most fun aspects of 2XKO, but nonetheless, I love it when tag fighters find ways to let us just focus on mastering a single character instead of having to be equally good with two or three.

Perhaps the best unique feature of 2XKO, though, is the fact that it’s a fighting game that can be played cooperatively with a friend. In Duos mode, each person controls their own character, with the off-screen player being the one that can call the assist, and the other being the one that has to do the active tag to give up control to their partner. It works both as a fun way to play a fighting game with a similarly skilled friend that doesn’t involve having to beat each other up, and also as a way to introduce someone new to the genre and be able to give them real-time feedback.

To really test this mode out, I played it with my best friend who typically has zero interest in fighting games. We got into training mode, I put him on a very basic strike/throw gameplan with Blitzcrank (who is one of the simpler characters to use), and also gave him tips on when he should tag in his assist to support my own combos. We didn’t win a whole bunch, but we laughed a ton, had a couple of close sets, and it was just such a wonderful way to experience a genre I love with a friend that I normally never get to share in that kind of joy with. I don’t know if I’ve made a fighting game fan out of him, but at least I felt like I opened his eyes a bit to the joy of the genre and got him to understand what makes it such a special corner of the world of video games.

If there’s one glaring weakness of 2XKO right now, it’s the slim roster, with only 11 characters available as of its 1.0 release. 11 isn’t even a lot for a 1v1 fighter, which makes it that much worse for a tag fighter where you’re expected to find two characters that fit your playstyle. And while that does suck, and leads to a lot of repetition where you’re fighting against the same characters and the same teams over and over again, the blow is at least softened by the excellent design of those Champions. Whether it’s Ekko and his tricky clone mind games, Yasuo’s wild combo routes that have him stance-cancelling his way into bouncing his opponent all over the screen, Vi’s insane movement and whiff-punishing ability, or Illaoi’s tentacle set ups, these are some of the most fun fighting game characters I’ve ever played around with. And the beauty of it is that, due to the flexibility of 2XKO’s combo and Fuse systems, rarely do I ever see any of these characters being played exactly the same way by two different people.

Developer Riot Games has promised a fairly ambitious roadmap of five seasons per year, with a new Champion dropping every season, so at the very least 2XKO aims to double its roster size in its first two years. That said, being a free-to-play game, only six Champions are available when you first start, and the rest (including future DLC characters) need to be unlocked with either earned in-game currency or premium currency purchased with real money. Though, crucially, you are able to play with any of the characters in the offline modes, and in training mode, which means you don’t have to buy a Champion just to take them into the lab to try and figure out how to deal with their nonsense.

You also get a free Champion unlock token just for completing the tutorial, and another one for completing the "First Steps" missions, which shouldn’t take more than about two or three hours. So if you have a team in mind that you want to play, you can at least snag those two characters for free without any sort of significant grinding. That feels pretty sufficient for a free-to-play fighting game right out of the gate, and avoids any concerns about particularly powerful Champions being pay-walled for now. After you spend those tokens, you’re going to have to grind up 10,000 credits per Champion, which should take about a week, if you're on top of completing your daily, weekly, and featured challenges. That seems pretty reasonable, but what feels significantly less so is the 6,500 credits it costs to unlock a single palette swap for one character, or the 4,000 it takes for a simple avatar cosmetic item.

2XKO isn’t going to impress with its ancillary features and modes. There’s a cool online lobby with customizable avatars and cosmetics that you can purchase with both earned and premium currencies; there are combo trials for every champion to help you get some baseline proficiency level with them; and there is a solid tutorial that does a respectable job of onboarding new players and introducing experienced players to the more advanced aspects of the deep combat system.

That said, there’s no single-player mode whatsoever for the new players that 2XKO seems to be trying to draw in, forcing them to either just play in contextless battles against CPU opponents or face the wolves in online play. There’s also no way to practice while matchmaking, no replay takeover, and no deeper teaching tools to help you learn how to play or defend against specific characters, all features that I’d hope for from a major fighting game in 2025, even a free-to-play one.