PC input issues remain frustrating
Five years after it was first announced at Evo 2019, 2XKO is finally in the hands of domestic players thanks to ongoing closed alpha lab testing.
Prior to this test, many in the fighting game community were worried that Riot was targeting “casual players” too much with its League of Legends spinoff, with its simple controls and two-on-two system, but now that it’s released, the impression seems to be quite the opposite.
There’s been a fair bit of discussion in the FGC over the past few days about 2XKO control, but now that I’ve also spent a few hours in the alpha test, I’m finding it much harder than I expected to get a feel for total control over the game.
So let’s talk about why you feel that way.
Riot may have reduced the overall input barrier by using directional inputs instead of motion, and by having dedicated buttons for special moves, but what they’ve come up with so far is still quite complicated and a little odd.
The situation is also not helped by the pad/arcade stick issues the PC alpha is experiencing, which we’ll explain in more detail later.
Personally, I don’t find the controls in 2XKO to be unintuitive (or even terribly bad), but even after sitting in the lab and trying out some long combos, something just doesn’t quite work.
I had a very strange experience with 2XKO in the alpha as the discussion quickly changed from “controls are easy, game will be boring” to “game is too difficult”. Oh, so the difficulty doesn’t just come from complex inputs? Really? Say it louder!!!
— SGF | Fem!Shep (@FemShepFGC) August 9, 2024
Each has buttons for light, medium and heavy attacks, plus two special buttons and one dedicated to the tag system, making them essentially six-button fighters, but it never feels like it.
The number of regular and special buttons feels out of balance, and this doesn’t seem to get fixed no matter how many hours you play.
With even former Marvel vs. Capcom Evo champions confused by the controls at the start, you know something is up.
First impressions of 2xko. This game is not for everyone. The 6 buttons are confusing even to me. The gameplay feels like a more complicated mvci/powerrangers/bbtag. Very ham and oppressive, but kinda lame that makes putting someone in timeout seem easy. This is the best game ever!!!
— Chris G (@NYChrisG) August 9, 2024
Oddly enough, these controls are very close to those in DNF Duel, especially when using the Pad A configuration, but I didn’t really have any issues with them in that game.
DNF also used two special buttons to indicate direction instead of motion, but also used two regular buttons.
The difference is that there’s an extra Heavy and Tag button, and a lot more to remember in terms of universal and system mechanics.
It feels like part of the problem lies with the button layout itself, especially when playing with a pad.
Whether you use the main control scheme or a custom control scheme, something always feels out of balance.
I was thinking about the controls in 2XKO (note: I haven’t played the game). Do all the specials that are mapped to S1 and all the specials that are mapped to S2 have something in common? If not, it feels like an arbitrary distinction contributing to the awkwardness.
— K’eeg (@armormodechang) August 11, 2024
It also doesn’t help that there doesn’t seem to be a clear distinction between what moves to assign to the Special 1 and Special 2 buttons, and there’s no presence of things like a Shoryuken or semicircle move to help you intuitively understand from the start which attacks work for what and what they’re useful for.
The same is true when learning similar games like Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, except that game only uses one special button instead of two.
There’s obviously a lot of intricacy to the game, and players are really starting to figure things out, such as discovering the Touch of Death combo, but that initial learning curve isn’t what most people expected, especially given the feel of the controller.
Now, let’s talk a bit more about my experience playing the alpha version of 2XKO on PC so far.
Like many others, I began my 2XKO journey with the PC version and a DualShock 4 controller, but I quickly hit a similar wall.
The game detects the pad and the left control stick works but none of the buttons do anything.
Resetting the client several times didn’t help, so I had to navigate the menus with mouse and keyboard, but I also encountered other strange bugs, like the avatar creator going haywire when clicking on hairstyles.
I tried the fix by adding 2XKO to my Steam library and using Steam Input after launching it from there, but it didn’t help anything.
The DS4 didn’t work in the menus, but strangely enough it worked fine in actual gameplay, which meant lots of keyboard fumbling.
The last time I tried to play tonight, 2XKO no longer recognised the DS4, so I ended up plugging in my DualSense.
This seemed to work as I was eventually able to navigate the menus, but once I entered training mode, none of the buttons worked and any attempts to change buttons were interpreted as moving the right stick up.
And since the game crashed, I’ll probably switch to the PlayStation 5 for the time being.
When it came to actually playing the game, I opted for Pad A controls as they were closest to other titles I’ve experienced, such as DNF and Persona 4 The Ultimate in Mayonaka Arena.
I always always forgot there was even a hard attack button, messing up my specials all the time.
This is especially exacerbated by moves like Yasuo’s stance, which has a pretty extensive list of follow-ups you can perform that require you to hammer them into your head.
After over an hour of practice, I finally started to get the hang of it, though I still found myself stumbling at times with the Heavy and Special, along with the various uses of the Tag button.
Once I started playing the actual matches it got a lot more complicated, but it was still a lot of fun and I was learning a lot more on the fly.
I don’t think playing 2XKO on a pad is the hardest thing in the world, but it was a lot harder to get used to than I expected.
It’ll probably take more time before I know how I ultimately feel about how Riot has handled the control scheme.
So far, trying to get a Razer arcade stick to work with 2XKO on the Riot client has proven to be a very tedious task.
At first nothing seemed to work – no joystick, no buttons, nothing. I eventually went into the control settings and switched between “Arcade Stick 1” and “Arcade Stick 2” but the arcade stick was unresponsive.
Frustrated by my lack of progress, I decided to grab my keyboard and hop into the training room, only to find that once again, the game would not accept any input from my arcade stick.
After a while, randomly pressing buttons on the arcade stick started working. Emphasis on “random.” For no apparent reason at all. Partway through a training room session, the game started accepting button inputs without me having done anything special.
I was finally able to attack with my character, but still couldn’t move with the joystick – however, there was at least a reproducible solution to this part of the problem.
I ended up finding that I had to use a switch on the device to switch my Razer Arcade Stick from a left stick to a directional pad configuration. Needless to say, I’d never had to do this with any other game before.
Of course, I should mention that you still can’t press the pause button on an arcade stick to access the move list, and after what felt like pressing every key on the keyboard, I finally figured out that I could pause the game with “F.”
In the “Arcade Stick 1” setup, the top three buttons were set to input Special 1, Special 2, and Assist, and the bottom three were set to be the Light, Medium, and Heavy buttons. This felt weird, so I switched to “Arcade Stick 2” and swapped the positions of these buttons.
Control-wise, 2XKO is a lot simpler than I expected, which is to be expected considering it’s also the developer behind Rising Thunder. Still, the two dedicated special buttons are a bit of an annoyance.
2XKO is intended to be simple, but there is quite a learning curve when it comes to inputs, and I found myself confused after finishing the training mode – specifically, I was constantly confused about what action each special button press performed.
Overall, 2XKO feels like the type of game that requires some serious time to get used to, but only after you’ve worked out the odd technical issue that can arise when trying to get your input device to work.
2XKO has certainly beaten the accusation that it’s a tag-team based fighting game toned down for the general public, which has me even more interested in digging into how people outside of the FGC feel about the alpha test.
The game’s controls feel awkward and unbalanced when you actually play it, and for now it feels like the only thing you can do is get used to them and get better.
Nonetheless, I’m not really sure what to do to fully mitigate the situation without removing the feature, other than making it more clear why the special moves are placed there.
The ongoing controller issues on PC don’t help much either, but they should at least be addressed at some point.
Players will need to carefully choose which button layout feels most natural to them, but even at that point there will likely be some growing pains to dig into.
It’s fun to play a new tag game that grows as you piece together a bunch of different elements, but there’s certainly room for improvement to make the experience more consistent.
We’ll be putting together a full impressions breakdown of 2XKO’s alpha test, as well as a more in-depth write-up on the game, in the near future, so stay tuned.
Justin “AdaptiveTrigger” Gordon contributed to this story.