2XKO's Control Scheme is Not It

And other concerns about 2XKO's reception

Writing about games I haven’t played, that are unreleased, and that I’m negative on is admittedly a bit unfair.

But I often cover control issues. I’ve touched on controls in fighting games a few times, including in Quarter Circle Forward: Quite Cool and Fun, which is entirely about them.

I’ve played games with control schemes similar to 2XKO, and I’ve played fighting games since the 90s. (Actually I enjoyed the oft-disparaged Street Fighter 1, a late 80s game)

I’ve read reports and player impressions, watched videos and match footage. But 2XKO is invite-only and I haven’t been invited.

I think the game has issues, particularly in the controls. I don’t see it breaking through to a larger audience - it’s going to be a game for the usual fighting game players and a smattering of League players, most of whom will drop it quickly.

I’m going to explain why I think that. I’m not big on making predictions, so I prefer to think of this as expounding on concerns. But I’ll take my lumps if this ends up being way off.

2XKO’s “Lack of Vision”

2XKO’s mechanics significantly changed from “alpha lab 1” to “alpha lab 2.” Those changes weren’t well-received, at points lacked obvious motivation, and introduced new problems, leading to accusations that the game’s creators “lack vision.”

“Lacks vision” is vague; I would avoid that phrase. But the game lacks a central mechanical conceit, particularly one that relates to the League of Legends brand.

These are, as far as I can tell, 2XKO’s major selling points:

1. Has League of Legends branding

2. Is free to play

3. Is “accessible” via a simplified control scheme (we’ll get into this)

These dovetail nicely - together they make 2XKO enticing to try out. But they aren’t a mechanical vision and don’t answer “why would I stick with this?”

X-Men: Children of the Atom, Capcom’s first superhero fighting game, immediately stood out as bigger, bolder and more dynamic than previous games. Instead of throwing small fireballs characters shot out 6-hit beams. They could run, high jump, and use screen-filling super moves. Children of the Atom is not Street Fighter with X-Men characters swapped in, it’s mechanically a superhero fighting game.

Killer Instinct has long, easy-to-perform combos, but those combos can be “broken”, so players remain active on defense. That doesn’t have much to do with the plot of the game - Killer Instinct is about a fighting tournament hosted by a corporation, that a werewolf and a skeleton attend for some reason. Thematically it offers generic 90s edge - the character Orchid has a fatality where she shows you her boobs then you die of a heart attack. (If the other player is also Orchid they get jealous and pout - laudable attention to detail, if questionable gender politics) The game has a mechanical hook - the combo system, a Mortal Kombat lite attitude, and even a technical hook - it’s an Ultra 64 game with pre-rendered sprites and a dynamic camera. But none of those hooks are related.

Then there’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, a highly competent Street Fighter 2 knockoff. It has no novel mechanical elements and the gameplay isn’t related to the Turtles. You don’t collect ooze or eat pizza to power up your moves, it’s Street Fighter with turtle graphics.

That’s the sort of game Riot is making with 2XKO. It has a grab bag of mechanics borrowed from other games, in hopes of offering a best-of-breed combination. Nothing about League of Legends informs the gameplay of 2XKO other than that it stars League characters. It doesn’t have, for example, a system where characters gain XP and level up over the course of a match, they way they do in the MOBA. Nor does it have a mechanic like combo-breakers, novel but separate from the theme.

2XKO is like many games created by a generation that grew up on games. Those creators often have a strong grasp on genre conventions, are aware of and avoid mistakes of the past. Someone creating a 16-bit style JRPG in 2025 probably isn’t going to give characters the same painfully slow walking speed they had in 1993. But creators with rich knowledge of past efforts can be constrained by that knowledge, creating endless numbers of Metroidvanias, throwback RPGs and point-and-click adventure games content to sand off the rough edges from prior eras.

2XKO aspires to pick and present the best mechanics from other fighting games, with a League of Legends skin on top.

Does that qualify as a vision?

I find unique gimmicks overrated - plenty of great games lack a unique selling point. But the lack of any mechanical differentiator does seem risky.¹

Casual-Friendly Means (and only means) Removing Motion Inputs

2XKO has been billed as casual-friendly from the start. This is the first text on the official website:

2XKO is a free-to-play fighting game with explosive 2v2 gameplay and fast, intuitive controls.

(Side note: I don’t think “fast controls” means anything)

This is a long and complicated post, but here’s the short version: every time Riot says 2XKO is easy to learn, intuitive, welcoming, etc, what they mean is that it doesn’t use special move motions like the traditional quarter-circle-forward fireball. And that’s all that they mean, mechanically speaking.²

And here’s the rub: maybe removing special move motions can make a game easier to learn and play. But when you remove those motions you have to replace them with something, and the replacement scheme that 2XKO employs is harder to learn than motion inputs and compares poorly to other “modern” control schemes. I can’t think of any fighting game control scheme, traditional or otherwise, that’s less intuitive. (I was tempted to say Primal Rage but I don’t think that’s right)

What Casual Fighting Game Players Want

Potential fighting game players want the things players always want: nice presentation, good sound, etc.

Beyond that baseline, fighting game (and MOBA) players want characters that appeal in both form and function. This is a traditional strength of Street Fighter, which offers characters from an electrified green werewolf to an Indian guy with stretchy limbs to a sumo wrestler to a sexy lady, with wildly different playstyles. (This is a weakness of City of the Wolves, in which most of the characters play similarly)

Casual players want games that can plausibly be learned without hours of extra-game research. The genre has almost uniformly terrible tutorials, which present a rapid-fire litany of techniques with no chance to absorb lessons, and go zero-to-sixty from “press up to jump” to 30 hit combos.

This is a video, not an interactive tutorial, but it’s typical of how fighting game tutorials are structured. I can understand this video by relating it to mechanics from existing games: “super assemble” is DHC from the Marvel vs Capcom and “assemble smash” is Street Fighter 6’s Drive Impact combined with Street Fighter 3’s Universal Overhead. If you haven’t played those games though…good luck.

The biggest barrier to casual adoption of fighting games is one that plagues arcade games and their derivatives: lack of content. A home racing game can feature dozens of tracks, hundreds of cars, a career mode and open world events, while an authentic arcade racer is typically a handful of tracks and cars with no persistent game modes. This problem has existed since the NES days, when ports like Rygar and Strider dramatically differed from arcade versions in part to expand content.

Fighting games are incredibly fun to play locally with friends. Online play is an acquired taste. What many casual players want out of fighting games is meatier single-player modes that are more about unlocks and progression and less about one-off fights; your Soul Calibur 2 Weapon Master mode or the various RPG-ish modes in more recent Mortal Kombats. But significant single-player content is rare. There’s a huge gap in the content offered by NBA 2K vs NBA Jam, but Street Fighter 5 offers basically the same content that Street Fighter Alpha 2 did in arcades in 1996. (It’s difficult for fighting games to offer meaningful unlocks, in part for balance reasons and in part because those unlocks are often sold as DLC)

What Fighting Game Developers Think Casual Fighting Game Players Want

The removal of motion inputs. The end.

There’s a near pervasive belief among fighting game makers that motion inputs erect a steep barrier to entry and that removing them - while making no other gameplay or content nods to casual players - makes a game casual-friendly.

2XKO is launching with 10 characters, a low number especially in a tag fighter. 2XKO doesn’t have many weird guys - your Dhalsims or Twelves - but also lacks your obvious standard-issue Ryu / Ken / Kyo / Hanzo / Ryo / Haohmaru / Sub Zero / Jago / Leonardo. So it doesn’t score well in terms of characters players can vibe with.

In a 2024 Kinda Funny interview a Riot dev said tutorials weren’t something they were thinking about yet, so I assume they won’t be a quantum leap forward for the genre. What exists currently is a pretty classic fighting game tutorial. (As a reminder, that’s bad)

2XKO includes a complex array of mechanics and systems, and as a tag fighter it’s harder to learn and to visually digest than a 1-on-1 game. I expect the game to present the same learning woes as other fighting games.

Riot has been tight-lipped about content - it’s not clear if the game will include even a basic story mode, let alone something approaching the career modes found in sports games. It has missions like “use a super move in a match 5 times” and a battle pass, so it does have unlocks, but doesn’t appear to offer significant single player modes outside of staples like training and versus.

2XKO has been billed as a casual-friendly fighting game, and the free-to-start model is financially friendly. But in terms of gameplay and content I can’t see anything that makes it casual-friendly other than the removal of motion inputs. It doesn’t address any of the common pain points that have dogged fighting games for decades.

The Age Old Motion Inputs Debate That We’ll Sidestep

25 years ago motion inputs were the standard, so theoretical musing was the only way to explore alternatives. These days plenty of games ship with alternate control schemes, so there’s no need for heady intellectual debate. Instead we can look at the particulars.

What I’ve come to belatedly realize is that the motion input debate pits a specific well-understood control scheme - Street Fighter’s control scheme - against an unspecified theoretical replacement.

It’s reasonable to discuss the pros and cons of motion inputs. But a comparison requires two subjects. The pertinent question, for 2XKO or any game with a “modern” control scheme, is not “is removing motion inputs good?” It’s “is our replacement control scheme better than what we’re replacing?”

For 2XKO the answer is “no.”

Controls Deep Dive

2XKO’s Universal Moves

I’m not going to, but I could end now with “the prosecution rests.”

There’s a lot here - a lot of moves, terminology and mechanics. I don’t see how anyone could look at this and think it represents an easy-to-learn fighting game for casual players.

There’s dashing, running, high and low parries, “chain dashing”, “retreating guard”, tagging, “handshake tagging.” There are 4 types of assists - regular, charged, super and push. There are no concessions here in terms of simplifying mechanics for ease of use and understanding.

What’s a little less obvious is how fussy and difficult-to-operate these control are. There’s double taps, holding buttons, and pressing multiple buttons at once - the sort of control complexity that removing motion inputs is supposed to alleviate.

Here are the controls on a game pad.

This is an eight button game. Some of these buttons are macros: the parry button is a shortcut for low + high and dash is a shortcut for medium + high. So maybe it’s a 6 button game? (This is a picture from the official website and it has 8 buttons, don’t blame me!) But on a pad only the bottom-left and top-right pairs of face buttons are natural to press with your thumb. To press low + medium you have to reorient your thumb, or have a thick thumb tip. Pressing the left and right face buttons together, without accidentally hitting another button, is even harder. So while the macro buttons are technically optional some of them are practically necessary. This is similar to City of the Wolves, which is technically a 5-button game but is real pain to play without additional macros.

Blue Sky Special Move Inputs

3D action games frequently include special moves and don’t use motion inputs since “quarter circle forward” is confusing in 3D space, and doesn’t work well on analog sticks. Those games usually use a bumper as a modifier key to the face buttons - hold the right bumper and press one of four face buttons to do one of four special moves.

Using a bumper as a modifier key is my first instinct. If you want more than four moves you can use the other bumper, both at once, etc. If that’s still not enough…well at that point I don’t think you’re making a casual-friendly fighting game.

I’m surprised this scheme isn’t used more often. I’m not sure why it isn’t; maybe because it’s natural on a gamepad but doesn’t map well to sticks. (Street Fighter 6 does use roughly this setup for the “assist” button)

Riot is in a tough spot there. Casual gamers mostly own pads, but fighting game fanatics often use sticks or leverless controllers. Nobody complains that Smash Brothers doesn’t work well on sticks, but fighting game players expect a game that looks like a traditional fighting game to work on them. League of Legends is a PC game so Riot wants to accommodate keyboard players as well.

For whatever reason let’s say modifier keys are out. Another obvious approach is combining a special move button with different directions. This gives you 5 different special moves if you restrict to cardinal directions, and 9 if you include diagonals.

This is how Marvel Tokon works and how Street Fighter 6 works - and Smash Brothers as well, basically.

2XKO Special Move Inputs

2XKO offers two different special move buttons, “S1” and “S2”, that combine with directions for a total of 18 available inputs.

The decades-old motion input debate has centered on arguments like “a 360 motion is harder than a fireball motion, so the 360 can be more powerful.” I sidestepped these arguments earlier because 2XKO’s biggest issue isn’t one that comes up often in these debates.

The biggest problem with 2XKO’s control scheme is that it employs no systemic logic or organizational principles. It can’t be learned as much as memorized.

Systemically Organized Special Moves

Street Fighter 2 has a systemic, and therefore learnable, control scheme. The top row of buttons is punches and the bottom kicks - makes sense as your legs are beneath your arms. Attacks on the left are weaker, faster, and have less range, and attacks on the right are stronger, slower and have more range.

In the Street Fighter series there’s a clear hierarchy of moves. Pressing an attack button gives you a normal attack. Pressing a direction and a button sometimes gives you a “command normal” - these moves tend to have extra properties like built-in movement. (Chun-Li’s aerial head stomp is an early example) Then you have special moves, which require a motion plus a button, do block damage, and can cancel normal moves.

The special moves follow the same rules as the basic button layout: moves that use your upper body are done with punch, lower-body moves use kick. Using a left button produces a move lesser in some sense - weak punch produces a slow fireball and heavy punch a fast fireball.

Consistent use establishes patterns, both in games and across them. Quarter-circle-forward + punch throws a projectile in Street Fighter 2, in Marvel vs Capcom, and in SNK’s King of Fighters. A move that’s functionally a Dragon Punch but uses the feet is a Dragon Punch motion plus kick - that’s how you do Gen and Adon’s uppercuts in Street Fighter Alpha 2, or Joe Higashi’s Tiger Kick.

Some of these rules are clear enough to recognize on a conscious level. Some of them are less clear but still follow a subconsciously perceptible pattern. The hurricane kick uses a backwards fireball motion. Moves that look like hurricane kicks, where characters spin around a vertical axis, tend to use backwards motions. Fei Long’s anti-air special, a rising spinning kick, is done with a reverse dragon punch motion plus kick. That’s a combination of three separate rules (or guidelines at least): anti-air moves use dragon punch motions, kicks use kick buttons, and spinning moves use backwards motions.

This system breaks down on the edges - when Blanka rolls up into a ball that’s not clearly an upper or lower body move. But for the most part this is systemic and learnable, or at least falls into repeated patterns.

It’s enough for players to grasp these patterns on an intuitive level. I recently played the demo for Cairn, a mountain-climbing game in which you control all four limbs without explicitly selecting which one you’re controlling. After a few minutes it felt natural, even though I can’t describe exactly how it works. (I guess you control whichever limb is supporting the least weight)

Special Moves as a Series of One-Offs

Now let’s take 2XKO’s control scheme. There are three attacks - light, medium and heavy. This is already less descriptive than Street Fighter in that “weak attack” conveys less than “weak kick.” Tekken and Mortal Kombat also use more descriptive button names - left/right punch/kick and high/low punch/kick.

2XKO uses two special move buttons, “S1” and “S2”. There’s no indication, based on name, why a move would go on one button or the other.

Ideally we’d name these buttons to differentiate their use. Maybe one button is punch and one kick, or “offensive special” and “defensive special.” DNF Duel uses two special attack buttons, “skill” and “MP skill” - MP skills use MP and are more special. (The “skill” button is arguably more of a third attack button than a second special move button)

Naming the buttons enforces organization, but it’s also limiting, or at least demands creative thinking. What if you name the buttons “offense” and “defense” but can only think of one defensive move for Jinx? Or name them “punch” and “kick” but one character uses guns and one swings a giant axe?

If we’re giving up on meaningful names there are still ways to enforce order. We can create broad rules like “anti-air moves are always down + S2” or “if a character has a projectile, it’s always S1, and if a character has a second projectile, it’s always towards + S1.” Marvel Tokon, DNF Duel and Smash Brothers all do this to some degree - Up B in Smash is your vertical recovery move.

Characters could also follow individual logic - “Jinx has two guns, with each assigned to one button” or “Blitzcrank’s S1 is long range moves, and S2 is short range moves.”

Unfortunately if 2XKO employs such logic it’s not clearly evident. Braum has a move where he enters a defensive stance, it’s back + S2. Vi also has a defensive stance, but it’s down + S1. Darius and Blitzcrank both have long range grabs that pull the opponent in, and those are both S1, so that’s something. Illaoi also has a long range grab, it’s down/back + S1. A Riot developer reportedly suggested that Ekko displays some internal logic - his S1 controls his Timewinder projectile and his S2 does…other stuff. But towards + S1 is a rushing attack that doesn’t use Timewinder.

Illaoi follows some internal logic in that S2 plants tentacles and S1 uses them. But some of her S1 moves slide forward and hit the enemy, and some of her S2 moves do as well. So while there’s a clear functional difference between the buttons there isn’t a clear visual one.

Jinx has three guns. Two of the guns are mapped to S2 and one to S1. S1 also does non-gun things. Pressing any down direction and S2 gives you a move that follows a global “upward moves are done with down directions” pattern. But on S1 shooting upwards is back + S1, not down. You can also get an upward-angled move by pressing forward + S1 then holding the button. So “upward moves are done with down directions” is a loose pattern at best.

The forward + S1 move, when held, looks nearly identical to Ekko’s Timewinder Toss - in both cases the characters use one hand to throw a lingering projectile into the air. But Ekko’s is done with down + S1, not forward.

This lack of systemic rules extends to how individual moves work. Here’s an example of a Blitzcrank move:

Forward translating spinning strike. Hits both in front and behind Blitzcrank. Each hit charges a bit of Steam for Blitzcrank. The startup of Spinning Turbine can be special cancelled into either Prompt Disposal or Trash Compactor while retaining the forward momentum from Spinning Turbine.

This description uses the terminology “special cancel.” In Street Fighter if a move can be “special cancelled” it can be cancelled into any special move - you can do crouching medium kick → fireball, crouching medium kick → dragon punch, or crouching medium kick → hurricane kick. In Street Fighter the “special cancel” is a systemic concept.

This move can be “special cancelled” but only into two specials, not all of them. Correction: Trash Compactor is an Ultimate move. So this move can be cancelled into one other special move or into an Ultimate move. It can’t be cancelled into other special or super moves.

In Street Fighter every move that can be cancelled into a special can be cancelled into a super, but the converse isn’t always true - some moves can be cancelled only by supers. This is another systemic rule: super moves are a ladder rung above special moves so they can do anything a special move can do and more.

This Blitzcrank move can be “special cancelled” but just by one special move. It can’t be super-cancelled, even though super moves exist a tier above special moves. But it can be Ultimate-cancelled.

This is a series of one-off rules phrased to look like they exhibit systemic logic.

Special Moves as a Series of Fussy One-Offs

The knock against motion inputs is that they’re difficult. But there are multiple axes of difficulty. Traditional motion inputs may be hard to perform but learning what to perform isn’t difficult.

In 2XKO learning what to perform means memorizing all the moves. Pressing a direction and a button isn’t hard, but remembering which direction and button to press isn’t easy when they don’t follow patterns. But I have to grant that pressing a direction and a button is, operationally, easier than pressing three directions in succession followed by a button.

A significant number of the special moves aren’t simply a direction and a button though. There are many “hold ok” moves and other additional input complexities.

Here is Blitzcrank’s S1, Rocket Grab:

Long range hit grab that pulls the opponent in on hit and on block. When Blitzcrank has a bar of Steam, they will shock the opponent on hit. Hold S1 to charge Steam. Pressing forward and S1 will Rocket Grab even when held. If Blitzcrank successfully hits the opponent on the ground, this can be cancelled into Power Fist.

As best I understand this, pressing S1 does Rocket Grab. Holding S1 charges up Steam, which is a totally different move mapped to the same button. Pressing forward and S1 does a Rocket Grab even if you hold the button.

Hmm.

I assume in some cases players were trying to do a Rocket Grab but holding the button down for too long and getting the Steam Charge instead, and this alternate version avoids that issue. But in that case why not make Forward + S1 Rocket Grab and S1 Steam Charge, or S1 Rocket Grab and back + S1 Steam Charge? Why do we have 2 moves mapped across 3 inputs?

Here’s Ekko’s Chronostrike:

Traveling strike. Creates an Afterimage. Hold for Volatile Afterimage. Hold forward to ensure Ekko does not rewind.

This is another move where holding the button gives you a variation and holding forward gives you another variation that’s apparently a sort of impossible-to-screw-up version. Presumably some players were rewinding when they didn’t want to, so this move has an optional additional input that prevents those future inputs being taking effect? Honestly at this point I’m a bit lost.

This is arguably practical - the developers observe that players repeatedly flub a handful of moves and add workarounds. But I think you have to concede that something has gone wrong when your game that advertises an easy-to-operate, intuitive control scheme adds alternate impossible-to-flub versions of moves because players are getting tripped up. Maybe this is less error-prone once you master it but it’s definitely less understandable.

Control Wrap Up

In game development these two things are often both true:

• Something is obviously flawed and just not-it, and it feels like there has to be a better way

• Nobody on the team can think of a better way

In my experience this is especially common with control schemes.

The 2XKO control scheme to me is just not it. It’s a game with 6 to 8 buttons but only 3 normal attacks. It requires simultaneous presses of buttons that aren’t aligned. It uses analog triggers for moves that are done often and need precise timing. (As opposed to say Street Fighter 6 using trigger for Drive Impact) We have two special move buttons that we can’t think of names for, and we also struggle to come up with any rules for their use, across characters or even just for one character in isolation.

I made this chart (before Blitzcrank was revealed) of which direction-plus-button combinations characters use. Knowing nothing else about the control scheme this should give one pause. Glancing at some of these characters there’s an apparent “no diagonals” rule - but that’s not a rule. Only three of the eight characters use a lot of both buttons. Yasuo uses neutral + S2 and back + S2 (the neutral is implied in the graphic ) - that’s it for S2. He doesn’t use back + S1, so Windwall, his back + S2, could go there. That leaves neutral + S2 as the only move S2 move. But if you’re willing to use diagonals, and we are for some characters, just stick it on a diagonal. Or on up. That move is a projectile so we could also, radical suggestion, make it a fireball motion. “How do we make Yasuo throw a fireball?” feels like a problem solved in 1991. But in 2025 there’s effectively a dedicated fireball button.

Our intuitive control scheme includes holding buttons to get move variations, and sometimes holding a button produces an entirely different move. For some moves holding a direction gives you an alternate, less-error-prone version of the same move, I guess?

There are many contextual follow-ups, so the controls are highly state-dependent. Those follow-ups also lack clear patterns.

And there’s the more subjective hand-feel problem: command normals, special moves, tags and assists are all done via direction + button - they’re all effectively command normals, without textural variation.

On top of all that, a significant swath of players actively resent the removal of motion inputs. They think it results in a “baby game”, removes the satisfaction of left and right hands working together, adds extra buttons, overloads the right hand, doesn’t work well on stick, etc etc. A sizable number of players assume that a game that only offers “modern controls” isn’t for them. (I’m one of those players) The developers of Invincible originally said it wouldn’t include motion inputs then acquiesced following outcry.

This is the sentiment you’re up against when you replace motion inputs with a questionable substitute. Some players find this alternate control scheme difficult or unintuitive, and others just don’t like it. I didn’t cherry pick these comments, they aren’t outliers. On any forum discussing 2XKO or fighting game control schemes they’re common.

I’ve recently touched on the belief that developers need to build systems before evaluating them. That’s sometimes true, and it’s often true of controls. But controls are tricky enough to pose a trap: what if you implement a control scheme and it’s merely ok? Control schemes take refinement to go from good to great, so maybe the control scheme, while flawed, “shows promise” - not bad enough to give up on, but not good enough to be confident in. I suspect this is a trap 2XKO has fallen into, and a trap many developers fall into when they’re ideologically enamored with a feature. Personally I would downvote even trying out a system of two special move buttons where we can’t name the buttons or describe what they do - to me that indicates more thought is required at the conceptual stage.

The End of the Experiment

We keep hearing that games without motion inputs are more attractive to players but those games keep coming out and not attracting more players. 2XKO is based on a huge cross-media IP, is made by one of the richest gaming companies, and is a solidly traditional fighting game other than that it lacks motion inputs. It’s as good a test subject as can exist in real world conditions.

If the player base ends up being fighting game stalwarts and a handful of League players can we admit that removing motion inputs has limited value?

In 1999 the idea that motion inputs were limiting the appeal of fighting games was an interesting and untested hypothesis. In 2025 it’s well-tested and it just doesn’t appear true. I wrote about this in 2018, when I noted that Fantasy Strike, a fighting game without motion inputs, was one of crowdfunding platform Fig’s biggest flops. Nothing has changed since then - there’s been no significant success story. At best you can argue that Street Fighter 6’s modern controls provide a nice onboarding option for casual players. But Street Fighter 6 makes motion inputs optional rather than removing them and offers a huge (for the genre) amount of single-player content.

Maybe motion inputs do put a ceiling on appeal versus some ideal alternative. Maybe Hollow Knight’s bug theme caps its appeal - that’s probably true! But that’s not a valuable observation unless you can suggest a better alternative.

When we remove motion inputs we have to replace them with something. In 2XKO that something is left wanting.

1. Without getting into it, I don’t count Fuses as a significant differentiator

2. Maybe a duo mode is also welcoming, though that’s a surprisingly common but rarely impactful feature of tag fighters