Is gud game.

[11/2/25]: Alright so since people have been fairly mixed about this game I want to go out on a limb here to express my own thoughts as someone with a sub 1200 hours on this game, spent over $500 in cosmetics (which I have no regrets on), organizes tournaments for this game and other platfighters in the past, competes at both locals and regional tourneys, made a discord server dedicated to both playing this game and improving, and as of writing this I'm currently 1228 and have beaten multiple diamond and master ranked players in sets both online, and in bracket.

This game in my heart is a personal 10/10, back at Genesis 2024 (A Supermajor tournament) I took only a couple days of playing this game during that weekend to see what I needed to, and I was convinced from that point that the game was for me. The feel, the physics, and the characters were all something I wanted to try more of. Soon after I backed the Kickstarter with $50, and after this game has come out, I only regret I didn't put more into the backing, because this game is everything I've wanted and more.

I want to put this context first because I want the people who only have these reviews or a small taste of the game from local setups as a frame of reference can only infer so much of if they feel this game is worth their time with very little outside of spending a hefty amount of time with this game, as is par for the course with many fighting games/platfighters.


Rivals of Aether II is a competitively focused platform fighter game, akin to the genre trendsetter, Super Smash Bros. Its cast takes iconic archetypes from the series and it's community mod, Project M (which was also later succeeded by Project Plus), and blends elements from said archetypes to create inspired or exaggerated remixes on them to create a high power level cast of characters, but still balanced across the whole roster to push them to all be solo viable in a competitive setting.

On top of this game being built with rollback netcode and the promise of *FREE* characters for the rest of the game's lifespan, this game has also given players continuous stream of new content and cosmetics, with new sets of costumes and palettes every month, and a monthly event battle pass with multiple free cosmetics (including a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥) AND free premium currency. With how much content you get from free and having a plethora of cosmetics that are able to earned via grinding coins without having to sell your soul and all your time just to scrape enough to earn a single palette or skin, unlike many other games with a free and premium currency system, you genuinely can get a costume and some extra alternate colors for every character in a reasonable amount of time.

An incredibly generous economy for a game that only costs $30 and can't profit off making new characters and selling them as additional content like many others can, which means the devs don't have to worry about balancing characters around them being DLC to encourage sales, but also means they have nipped a lucrative cashflow for themselves in the bud before this game even released, along with the fact that their bundles in game do not ever go away and can be bought at any time, curbing the encouragement of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) tactics also from the get-go.

The engine and this game feel amazing to play and I only have scratched the surface of what can be done with this game so far. Of course the idea of what feels good differs from person to person, so I will just say that for those who like the hard values, this game has a global 6 Frame window of buffer for many of it's actions. This has shown to me after dealing with Smash Ultimate's 9 Frame Tap Buffer and ∞ Hold Buffer, along with the infamous online on delay-based netcode that objectively had failed in both stability in gameplay and had been the source of many unintentional inputs due to the over-lenient buffer system, Rivals II's 6 Frame buffer is not only a very accessible amount for those wanting to a try a platform fighter with a focus on mechanics from older titles in the genre, while still being precise enough to not have multiple inputs buffer across entire interactions. Along with both the return of many iconic mechanics from those same older games, either redone to be more intuitive or more accessible to players who do not have the knowledge already when onboarding to this game.

Now, I have to get to the parts I have criticisms of.

The first of them being that while I am personally blessed to have a machine that can run this game on High-Medium settings and at 165 FPS stable, I cannot deny that for many others who are both trying to get into this game and those that have been with it since it's release in November 2024 has been rough on the performance side of things. I personally have a Nividia 3060 GTX and a AMD Ryzen 5800H w/Radeon + 24 GBs of RAM, but that is not the standard for most people who have a general purpose computer or laptop, and unfortunately has gotten less stable with performance for those on lower end machines to run this game and have made harder for those who want to host this game at tournaments to find machines that can run this game at a stable and responsive rate.

I know this game has received a lot of optimizations under to hood over the last few months of patches but that unfortunately doesn't counter all the issues that this game has, and while I'm aware that game making is hard it still has a reason that there is a demand for Quality of Life features for disabling certain elements of the environments, adding Render Scaling, pre-caching shaders, and being able to select the rendering backend without having to use only launch option commands (something akin to PEAK's properties where you can select it there before launching the game.) I believe most people have a higher standard for competitive fighting games than they did 5-10 years ago and many people who I have discussed this game with in multiple regional scenes and online spaces have generally come to a consensus of about a 120 FPS minimum and a 3 Frame input delay maximum for a tournament standard, and unfortunately that is not the easiest things for those just trying to host their local tournaments or even more herculean of a task for those running a regional, major, or supermajor tournament. I believe this will be alleviated over time as both technology becomes cheaper and as the game gets more optimized and eventually ported to console, and I have seen that this team is willing to put in the time and effort into making this game better.

My second criticism is the onboarding process for newer players to the Rivals franchise and platfighters a whole. This is still at the end of the day a (relatively) small indie team working with a very finite amount of resources to create this game and its content while also keeping food on the table for their employees, and the developers have admitted that the way this game released without a lack of features and tutorials was due to running out of said resources. It is lacking, and I understand completely why the process exists in it's current state and I know that the team will continue to alleviate this rough point too, as they have shown to have already with the additional training mode options and trials for improving your skills with scenarios like edgeguarding and chasedowns, so I am not worried about this long term but it is still a problem for those want to learn this game *now*.

Thankfully, not only is this game blessed with a dev team that actually TRIES to make a good game and continue to improve it, but also a community that have created a multitude of resources for players getting into this series and genre can access to be able to get up to speed with both terminology and mechanical concepts for the game, along with guides on how to interact with said mechanics. (Dragdown Wiki)

I hope who reads this tries this game, it's amazing.