Bottom Line: Aether Studios built the most technically honest platform fighter on PC — flawless rollback, world-class lab tools, and a monetization model that shames its competitors — then forgot to give you anything to do when you're not fighting a human being.
The Gameplay Loop
Rivals II feels heavier than Rivals I. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
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 you fell in love with. What I can say with confidence 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 genuinely smart intervention, and it stops the added defense from calcifying into turtling.
Character design is the other place the studio's experience shows. Ten launch fighters, 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 isn't just narrative dressing; it's 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 magnificent 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 extraordinary 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 genuine cultural artifact, shipping without a narrative on-ramp isn't a missing feature. It's a missing audience.
That vacuum feeds directly into the matchmaking complaint that dominates negative reviews. For months after launch, new players were routinely fed to veterans who had been playing Rivals since 2017. Ranked matchmaking can only sort players it has enough of; 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 3-0 in ninety seconds and leaves.
This is the schism in the Steam score. Players who came through the door already fluent in platform fighters find one of the best-built competitive games on PC. Players who came for the art style find a wall.