Rivals of Aether II

There’s a particular kind of courage in making a sequel that argues with its own predecessor. The 2017 Rivals of Aether was a thesis statement: strip the platform fighter down to its studs. No shields. No ledges. No grabs. Just movement, spacing, and the sound of two people trying to hit each other in mid-air. It became a cult object precisely because of what it refused to include.

Rivals of Aether II puts all of it back.

Developer Aether Studios — still an independent shop, still working outside the shadow of any platform holder — has rebuilt the game in 3D while keeping the fighting plane resolutely 2D. The launch roster shipped with elemental Rivals (Zetterburn, Orcane, Wrastor, Kragg, Forsburn, Maypul, Absa, Ranno, Clairen, Fleet), drawn from warring civilizations that channel Fire, Water, Air and Earth. The roster has since grown, and every new fighter has arrived free, permanently. That is a shipped, repeated pattern rather than a launch promise, and it is the most important thing about this game’s business model.

The market position is unusual. This is a genre with exactly one commercial gorilla, and that gorilla lives on a console you can’t buy this game for. Rivals II instead colonizes the space that gorilla can’t reach: PC, Steam, rollback-native, with a training suite that treats you like an adult. The reception reflects the trade-off. Steam reception is split — a positive aggregate that hides a real schism, with sentiment cooling over time. It picked up an Evo Awards nomination for Fighting Game Release of the Year in 2025, which tells you the competitive community respects it. A chunk of the original’s audience feels quietly betrayed. Both are true.

• The Full Modern Toolkit — Plus Three Wildcards: Shields, ledges, grabs and throws all return to a series that famously banned them. Aether hedges the defensive bloat with three original mechanics — Pummel Special, Ledge Special and Getup Special — that hand offense a way back in from positions that are dead ends in every other platform fighter.
• Rollback Netcode That Actually Works: Not “rollback support.” Rollback as the architectural foundation, wired into both ranked and casual queues. Online play is the game’s primary surface, and it’s built like it.
• A Lab, Not a Practice Mode: Live frame data, hitbox visualization, and replay analysis ship in the box. This is the kind of tooling that used to require third-party mods and a Discord server full of people willing to explain them.
• Cosmetic-Only Monetization: Every fighter is free forever. Skins, taunts and emotes carry the revenue. The competitive playing field is never for sale.
• Local Multiplayer That Wasn’t an Afterthought: 1v1, 2v2, free-for-all, and split-screen — plus CPU battles, achievements, multiple languages, and Steam Deck Verified status.

The Gameplay Loop

The sequel is a heavier game than its predecessor, and that weight is a design consequence, not a bug.

Adding a shield to a platform fighter changes the fundamental question of every neutral exchange. In the original, the question was where will they be? — pure spacing, pure movement, pure read. In the sequel, the question becomes where will they be, and will they simply refuse to be hit? Shields introduce a defensive option with a low skill floor and a high reward ceiling, and everything downstream — grabs to punish shields, throws to convert grabs — is the genre’s standard answer to the problem shields create.

So the loop got slower and more layered. Exchanges have more steps. Punishes require more setup. Matches breathe differently.

Whether this is a loss depends entirely on which game a player came to love. What’s clear is that Aether saw the risk coming and engineered against it. Pummel Special, Ledge Special and Getup Special are the most interesting design work in this game, and they’re the least discussed. Each takes a moment that is traditionally a defensive freeze-frame — you’ve got someone in a grab, you’re hanging on a ledge, you’re getting up off the floor — and installs an aggressive, character-specific option there. The ledge, in most fighters of this shape, is a safe harbor and a stalling tool. Here it’s a launch pad. That’s a smart intervention, and it stops the added defense from calcifying into turtling.

Character design is the other place the studio’s experience shows. The launch fighters are each mechanically distinct enough to feel like a separate game — Kragg building rock pillars, Forsburn manipulating smoke and clones, Absa laying down a charged cloud that turns the stage into a trap. The elemental framing doubles as a legible shorthand for how each Rival controls space. Post-launch additions have expanded the roster without touching the “free forever” rule, which means the metagame evolves without splitting the playerbase into haves and have-nots.

Onboarding Friction — The Real Problem

Here is where the review turns.

Rivals II’s practice tools are excellent, and that is part of the problem. Frame data displays and hitbox visualization are gifts to a player who already knows what a frame advantage is. To someone who bought this because the characters looked cool, they’re an instrument panel in a language they don’t read. The game offers real depth and almost no ramp.

The single-player content is thin to the point of absence. There’s no proper story mode. CPU battles exist, and they exist in the way that a treadmill exists — functional, joyless, not a reason to open the app. In a genre where the biggest competitor’s campaign mode is a cultural artifact, shipping without a narrative on-ramp is a missing audience as much as a missing feature.

That vacuum feeds directly into the matchmaking complaint that recurs in negative reviews. Ranked matchmaking can only sort players it has enough of, and a smaller PC-only population means wider skill bands in every queue. The result is an onboarding experience where the game’s only real teacher is a stranger who beats you and leaves.

This is the schism behind the split reception. Players who came through the door already fluent in platform fighters find a well-built competitive game. Players who came for the art style find a wall.

The move to 3D models on a 2D plane is the safe choice, and Aether executed it well. Characters are designed to read cleanly at a glance — critical when you’re tracking two fast-moving silhouettes and a projectile — and the animation is built to carry weight through startup and recovery frames, which matters competitively, not just aesthetically. Some of the original’s hand-drawn charm is gone. What replaced it is more legible, more scalable, and frankly more sellable in a marketplace where cosmetics fund the roster.

The technical foundation is sound. The netcode is the headline feature: rollback done properly is meant to be invisible, and the architecture here is built around that goal. The design target is cross-country matches that play like local ones — the whole ballgame for a game that lives online.

The UI is competent rather than inspired — menus that get you to a match without ceremony, and a training interface dense with information it makes little effort to explain. Again: built by experts, for experts.

Steam is the only address. Console ports sit on the roadmap without announcement or date. There is no mobile version, official or otherwise.

On PC, this is a controller game running in a keyboard’s house: the analog precision the movement system assumes makes a gamepad or arcade stick the honest recommendation. Steam’s controller layer is built to handle the messy reality of different input devices.

The Steam Deck Verified badge deserves more credit than it usually gets: a frame-perfect fighter certifying on handheld hardware implies real optimization work, not a compatibility rubber-stamp. The Deck is a plausible place to drill combos; ranked on hotel Wi-Fi is a different conversation — rollback is forgiving, not magic.

The PC exclusivity remains the strategic weak point. It caps the player pool, which caps matchmaking quality, which produces the exact newcomer experience the negative reviews complain about. Console support is the fix, not a nice-to-have.

Rivals of Aether II is a strong competitive game wrapped in an incomplete product. The fighting is excellent, the netcode is a real technical achievement, and the decision to give away every fighter forever while selling only cosmetics is a notably consumer-friendly model — a stance worth copying by studios with far larger budgets.

But the neutral game is only part of the package; so are the hours before a newcomer understands what neutral means. Aether Studios built a fine house and forgot the front door. The absence of a story mode is the missing structure that would have taught new players the vocabulary the ranked queue demands, not a content gap to be patched.

The split reception is the honest picture. Buy this if you already love platform fighters, or if you have someone to learn it with. If you’re arriving cold and alone, wait for the console launch and the larger, better-sorted playerbase it should bring. The game deserves that audience. It just hasn’t yet built the thing that would welcome them.