After Six Years, The League of Legends Fighting Game 2XKO Finally Soft Launched, And It Seems Rad

By Elijah Gonzalez | September 11, 2025 | 9:30am

Video Games Features 2xko

After Six Years, The League of Legends Fighting Game 2XKO Finally Soft Launched, And It Seems Rad

Move over Silksong, you’re not the only game originally announced in 2019 that finally came out this week: Riot’s long-in-development fighting game, 2XKO, is finally here. Or well, sort of. Technically, it only entered its Closed Beta and isn’t accessible to everyone yet, but this test will run uninterrupted until the game comes out officially later this year, essentially marking a soft-launch.

And thankfully, it seems the long wait was worth it, because in an era where many fighting game fans criticize the genre’s decreasing complexity, 2XKO appears to combine a relatively accessible control scheme with a sky-high skill ceiling. It’s fast, freeform, and allows for some truly grimy nonsense—in a good way!

For those who haven’t been following, 2XKO is a fighting game set in the League of Legends universe that features well-known characters like Vi, Jinx, Ekko, Ahri, and more. It was developed by the team formerly known as Radiant Entertainment, which worked on Rising Thunder, another genre entry designed with beginners in mind. The studio was founded by Tony and Tom Cannon, brothers who are well-known figures in the fighting game community (FGC) for co-creating the Evo tournament series and for developing GGPO, which is the foundation for rollback netcode and its improved networking functionality.

I mention all this because this pedigree created some high expectations in the FGC, something that wasn’t helped by the game’s extremely long lead time and its relatively small launch roster of 10 characters. Thankfully, though, now that it’s more or less out, the discourse can finally shift from a combination of hype and doomposting to discussing the actual thing itself.

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To get the obligatory description of its central mechanics out of the way, 2XKO is a 2v2 tag game, meaning you switch back and forth between a pair of combatants. As for the button layout, there are light, medium, and heavy attacks alongside a button for Tag-related mechanics and two buttons for Specials. You should probably also map a macro for dashing and parrying, too, but those are optional.

As suggested by having buttons dedicated to Specials, 2XKO is the latest fighting game to ditch traditional arcade-inspired motion inputs for a simplified control scheme where you just press a button and a direction, a little like Super Smash Bros. On this note, there is also the option to utilize autocombos, where you can mash a single button to perform an attack sequence. This can be useful for beginners and annoying for veterans who trigger it by accident, but luckily, you can turn it off completely, offering the best of both worlds. Beyond picking two fighters, players also choose a Fuse, which are playstyle modifiers that range from Juggernaut, a mode that lets you play as a single character with enhanced powers instead of two, to Freestyle, which makes it so that you can tag between your characters multiple times in a sequence, jumping between the two to maximize their pressure.

Like most modern fighting games, there are several attempts here at getting new players in the door: the lack of motion inputs, autocombos, and the ability to play one character instead of needing to learn two. While the complete absence of motion inputs will undoubtedly be a sticking point for some veterans, the rest of these are toggleable, allowing the game to cater to multiple groups at once. And beyond offering these kinds of affordances for newcomers, 2XKO is one of the few recent entries in the genre that manages to do this while still seemingly maintaining a high skill ceiling.

Where this game really shines is in how its distinct characters combine with a freeform tag system that allows for tricky mix-ups and stylish combos. Case in point, many pro players have already devised positively diabolical pressure sequences that will require quite a bit of practice to pull off, indicating that there’s plenty to discover.

Much of this depth extends from the general lack of guardrails around how tagging works. You can switch to your ally at any point during an assist, and as previously mentioned, the Freestyle Fuse allows you to hop back and forth multiple times, leaving your foe dazed and confused. Since assists recharge fairly quickly, you’ll have ample opportunity to chain raw overheads into combos or keep your opponent locked down for a devious crossup attempt. Add in some smooth, fast-paced movement thanks to the ability to chain dashes together, and you have a high-speed experience that feels quite dynamic.

Another boon so far are the characters, who each offer very different playstyles. Vi is an agile boxer who can perform extremely sick uppercut combos seemingly inspired by Kazuya’s Electric Wind God Fist from Tekken. Blitzcrank is a grappler with nightmare extendo arms that can pull you in for a hug, and the ability to attack from above by transforming into a flying orb. Ahri has unique air movement and the ability to combo into her projectiles. And then there’s my personal favorite, Ekko, who can travel through time to mix up his opponents; this is as cool in practice as it sounds in theory.

However, while the core of this experience is quite strong and provides a sturdy foundation to build on, there are also quite a few concerns. While the previously mentioned characters play quite differently from one another, there just aren’t enough of them at the moment: 10 characters is a fairly tiny launch roster, free-to-play or not (and the beta only has nine of them).

Beyond this, some elements have been over- and undercorrected from the game’s previous Alpha tests. For starters, “oki,” which is when you pressure an opponent after knocking them down, feels very unrewarding right now because true “hard knockdowns” are few and far between. In the first Alpha, an aggressor’s options were a bit too strong, and characters like my beloved Ekko could execute demonic looping pressure that involved time-travel-themed high-low guessing games. In the second Alpha, a change was made so that players could roll in either direction after being knocked down, making it extremely hard to keep offense going. Now in the Closed Beta, knockdowns seem even weaker, and as far as I know, you can only get a hard knockdown after landing a forward throw or activating a costly Level 3 Super attack, which are even harder to pull off now because meter resets at the end of each round.

This decision was likely made to force more neutral interactions, which is a good idea in theory, but the end result is that you can sometimes get mixed up by a defender when you would normally have the initiative, which feels off. Additionally, I think the main issue with the game sometimes feeling non-interactive is that damage scored off combos still feels far too high in many cases. On Day 1, players almost immediately found several Touch of Death combos that can clean out a health bar in a single go, and I’ve personally been at the mercy of big body characters who deal well over half a life bar of damage off nearly every combo.

Beyond these very fixable issues, there are many other annoyances around the format of the Closed Beta, which will inevitably change with time. While I imagine the full release will allow you to queue for matches directly, as it stands, matchmaking is buried in a frustrating lobby system where you have to move a little chibi character around a digital arcade. I genuinely do not understand the ubiquity of this clunky solution to an already fixed problem, and if I could, I would press a button to wipe them off the face of the—please, I want to be able to queue up matches through a menu like in every other genre of video game.

Because matches are determined by which people happen to be in your little lobby instead of via proper skill-based matchmaking, it can be hard to find an evenly matched fight. It certainly doesn’t help that these servers are currently populated by a positively cracked player base made up almost entirely of folks who participated in the previous Alpha tests; if you were in those, you automatically got a Closed Beta invite.

As someone who hasn’t played since the first test a year ago and was trying out new characters for the first time yesterday, I found myself getting positively shellacked by players who very much weren’t operating at that “Day 1” level of flailing incompetence that you see in most fighting games, largely because it wasn’t Day 1 for them at all. All of this will almost definitely be solved when the game releases with real matchmaking and a much larger player pool, but I bring it up because, despite all the affordances 2XKO is attempting to make for genre neophytes, entering this beta as a true fighting game newbie would be like a guppy being tossed into a shark tank. The game may have a lower barrier to entry in theory, but its high damage combos and fast pace mean that even a relatively small skill gap can lead to very one-sided matches.

As for the last genuine concern, there’s the monetization: this is a free-to-play game, which, outside of Multiversus and Brawlhalla, doesn’t have a ton of precedent when it comes to fighting games. In this case, you will have to either pay for new characters or unlock them with in-game currency like tokens or credits. There will also be a Battlepass with cosmetics, which will have three paid tiers: “Premium (Just the Battlepass), Premium Plus (BP + 10 Levels), and Ultimate (BP + 25 Levels).”

Frankly, I have very little read on how this will feel in practice, because the beta doesn’t allow users to pay real-world money. The beta has six of its nine characters unlocked and gifts the player two unlock tokens for completing the tutorial, but I have no idea how much grinding will be involved to get a new fighter when the game comes out for real. Hopefully, characters won’t cost more than DLC characters in premium fighting games (for context, in Street Fighter 6, the season pass costs $30 and includes four characters). All that said, a great feature included here that isn’t present in most other fighting games is that you can play the entire cast of characters locally, allowing you to test them out in training mode or head-to-head in person to see if they’re for you before buying—this should definitely be the standard across the board.

While 2XKO still has some improvements to make, like bolstering its roster and fine-tuning its gameplay, the core experience is incredibly promising. It offers fast-paced movement and room for player expression, all while lowering the barrier to entry for new players. I’ll admit that I’m still fairly worried about its monetization and the prospect of long-term support — I’m a little concerned that it could go the way of Legends of Runeterra—but what’s here has me hoping it will find its audience. After all, I’d like to keep learning cheesy Ekko strategies for many matches to come.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.