Riot Games deserves credit for attempting something bold: translating the sprawling League of Legends universe into a full-fledged fighting game. The concept — a 2v2 fighter set in Riot’s flagship IP — was ambitious given the diverse cast of champions, but recent news that the development team has been downsized shows the project did not achieve the commercial success Riot expected.
I had intended to write a full review of 2XKO, but I couldn’t complete it in the way I planned. The reasons for that are tied to the issues I’ll outline below. That said, it’s important to stress that the game itself looks and feels well made in many respects; the studio clearly invested effort into the product. Even if headlines emphasize its shortcomings, players interested in something different should still try it for themselves.
In Riot’s public explanation for the staff reductions, the company said that while the game found some resonance with its core audience, it did not justify the headcount needed for ongoing support. That statement reads differently if the title had been intended as a small-scale side project, like some of Riot’s other experiments. Given the way Riot positioned and promoted 2XKO, it was clearly treated as a major release — which makes the cuts more telling.
One fundamental question is why Riot chose to build a fighting game at all. Fighting is a niche genre dominated by three long-standing pillars — Tekken, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter — which routinely command the lion’s share of the audience. These franchises have spent decades exchanging momentum between them, and they cultivate deeply committed competitive communities. While there is a smaller crowd that prefers titles like Guilty Gear or SoulCalibur, the mainstream fighting landscape is tightly controlled by the big three. Interestingly, high-level pro players from that scene, including noted names, did gravitate toward 2XKO and competed at top ranks.
If Riot wanted to lure a mass audience into a fighter, the company needed to bring something truly eye-catching. Marketing failed to do that: promotional work was underwhelming enough that many potential players remained unsure whether the game had even exited beta. The game does introduce innovative ideas, but those innovations have caveats that limit their broader appeal.
Mechanically, 2XKO does not reinvent the wheel as much as it refines certain conventions. The core 2v2 concept isn’t novel — it has precedent in crossover projects — but 2XKO takes it further by enabling intricate cooperative combos, with teams chaining sequences that can stretch into dozens of hits. That shared-combo depth is one of the game’s more distinctive features.
The match space is a strict 2D plane with all the attendant design choices: there are no sidesteps like in Tekken, and the motion and presentation lean less toward the cinematic realism you might see in other fighters. If anything, 2XKO is closest to Street Fighter: precise frame data, long-range attacks that can cover half the screen, and a notable roster of zoners whose playstyles depend on distance control. That latter archetype is less common in Tekken-style arenas.
One frequent criticism is the roster size — only twelve characters at launch. For many players, that feels stingy. The limited roster is partially offset by the game’s Fuse system, which lets players modify and empower a two-character team in different ways, yielding tactical depth. Still, if you enjoy learning a large cast incrementally, the small roster can make the experience feel repetitive fairly quickly.
Translating League of Legends into a fighting format also exposes limits in how well the IP maps to short, arena-based combat. LoL is rich with lore, and long-form storytelling has proven effective for Riot in other media. A compact, arcade-style fighter does not lend itself to the same narrative ambitions; there’s no sweeping campaign about dynastic conflicts or family sagas the way some fighting franchises develop their backstories. The result is a lighter narrative presence around the characters.
Characterization in fighting games can come through more than story — distinct combat styles and transformations often tell a personal story about a fighter. 2XKO attempts this, but much of the cast’s movesets feel like adapted MOBA abilities with mechanical extensions rather than fully reimagined fighting techniques. That reduces the sense of cultural or stylistic authenticity that some players expect from a character’s fighting identity.
Despite that, the game keeps some logical ties to champion roles from the MOBA: ranged carry characters naturally tend toward zoning tools, while others play more aggressively. For example, characters modeled on marksmen will lean on ranged control, though they are still capable of close-quarters bursts when properly optimized.
Ultimately, 2XKO ends up straddling two audiences without fully satisfying either. It takes the complexity and combo depth that fighting fans appreciate, but the title’s cartoonish presentation and its roots in League of Legends may deter traditional fighting-game purists. Conversely, players who come from League expecting a narrative-rich expansion of the lore may find the format too limited. Personally, I find the aesthetic and combat specificity of cartoonish fighters to be off-putting, and the game does demand a significant time investment to master at a high level. It’s not a bad game — just a highly specialized one — which makes it hard to see how Riot anticipated broader commercial success. One can only hope that future projects set in this universe will avoid a similar fate.