I started playing League of Legends in the summer of 2011. That fateful time would mark the beginning of a relationship that offered up Faker, Arcane, and endless copium about the LoL MMO. So as 2XKO, Riot's League of Legends fighting game, started to gather steam, friends and colleagues would look at me expectantly, hoping for a glimpse at the same kind of excitement I rustled up for the rest of the franchise. Now, a few hours with 2XKO's early access release has confirmed what I already knew – that excitement is just not there.
I went into 2XKO's early access release with no real expectations. My fighting game experience is limited almost solely to the Injustice series, and I didn't expect 2XKO to magically overturn my limited affinity for the genre straight away. What I wanted instead was an experience that would keep me coming back after the initial novelty had worn off - the League of Legends branding meant 2XKO would have no difficulty getting its hooks in me, but I hoped it would be able to hold on long enough for me to develop some genuine investment in the game itself.
Things started out well. I was a little overwhelmed by the first tutorial, but I learned enough to go 2-1 in my placement matches. Granted, I did rely on something of a brute-force strategy. While 2XKO is supposed to be a tag fighter that lets you swap between allies, I opted instead to take the Juggernaut trait into my first games, empowering my chosen champion Ahri, but removing the ability to tag in a friend. Nevertheless, I came out of my initial bouts feeling like perhaps that longer-term investment could be kindled.
The bigger they are...
Perhaps foolishly, I elected at this point to use my one free character unlock. Buoyed by my early success and enamored by the unconventional playstyle shown off in his reveal trailer, I picked Teemo. Dreams of ragebaiting friend and foe alike quickly evaporated, however, as I realized that the Swift Scout's unique toolset came at the cost of getting absolutely bodied as soon as a towering foe like Darius or Yasuo got within (their) arms' reach. I did at least succeed in ragebaiting my friend during a set of doubles matches where we swiftly realized that I had no idea how to handle myself with Teemo, setting them up for being on the wrong side of several 2v1 batterings.
Humbled, I returned to the Ahri pick that had got me through the tutorial and my placement games, but it soon became clear that I was being dramatically outpaced by the rest of the community. With very little semblance of official matchmaking present in 2XKO's arcade-style social hub, I was being placed into more and more imbalanced matchups, struggling to get in a single hit while being comboed to the Shadow Isles and back by seasoned fighting game players.
Clearly I needed practice, but the bot games were no help at all - I was dispatching them as mercilessly as my human opponents had dispatched me, which meant I wasn't learning anything. I opted instead for the advanced tutorials, only to find a wall of complex inputs in the first combo 2XKO tried to teach me. I wanted to take the lessons I might have learned back into real matches, but in my first game back I was beaten faster than ever before. I'd seen enough to decide that, right now at least, 2XKO is not the game for me.
The harder they fall
Despite making the decision to cut my losses, I understand why Riot has made 2XKO. As a studio built almost entirely around competition, a fighting game is a natural fit, and the existence of this game is an extension of the philosophy that encouraged Riot to make Valorant back in 2020. That effort paid off, and now Riot's shooter shares something of a mutual respect with Counter-Strike. A huge roster of characters very used to battling each other gives 2XKO a huge well of ideas to draw from that could grant it a very long life if it manages to build an audience within the fighting game community.
That community does not count me among its numbers, and that's fine – Valorant isn't for me either, but I'm happy to see it successfully carve out its own space. But with 2XKO failing to grab me, I'm reminded of the other Riot games that did, most notably its selection of indie games published under the Riot Forge label.
In its few short years before being killed off in 2024, Forge had managed to push out an array of cult classics from acclaimed studios, but it never really found its audience even among League of Legends players. The potential reasons for that failure are myriad, but the games it made were certainly more suited to me than Riot's other competitive efforts have proved to be. Clearly, multiplayer will remain the studio's bread and butter, but as a fan of nearly 15 years, I wish I could find something within it that felt like it fitted my tastes a little more.
