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You don’t have to be a League of Legends fan to see the appeal of upcoming fighting game spinoff 2XKO. Its art style alone is stunning, each character bursting with immaculately drawn animations that bring their deadly attacks to life. It’s still a way out from launch but you might be able to get a chance to play it soon as the developer has just announced the dates for an alpha test.
Titled 2XKO Alpha Lab, this playtest will let players jump into the action from home to try out the squad-based fighting game for themselves. This follows on from beta signups which started earlier in the year, back when the game was changing from being known as Project L to its new, snappier title. Developer Riot Games is looking for feedback and comments on every aspect of the game, so if you’ve got experience with League of Legends or fighting games – this might be your chance to get in and be heard.
Over recent months the developer has been adding new characters to the roster, filling out the bevy of champions expected to be playable at the game’s launch. With over 140 League of Legends characters to choose from, it’s a pretty unpredictable affair to even try and guess who’ll be next – though my money’s on anyone who’s also been featured in the Arcane animated series. As part of the announcement for the Alpha Labs test, Riot let slip that a new character reveal will be coming soon at some point prior to the playtest’s start.
In a development Q&A you can watch above, Riot speaks about some of the additional work it’s undertaking to make sure that 2XKO is accessible and entertaining for new players and veteran fighting game fans. The Pulse Fuse system is a way of bridging that gap, by allowing inexperienced players the ability to do automatic combos simply by mashing one of the different attack buttons.
The idea is that players will experiment with this, slowly adding in other move types to build their own combos before breaking free of the system altogether. For higher-skill players, they may wish to simply manually decide what attacks they use – equipping a different Fuse to amplify a particular aspect of their chosen character instead.
The 2XKO Alpha Labs playtest will run from Thursday August 8 to Monday August 19 and players from the UK, USA, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, and France can take part. If you’d like to sign up for a chance to test the game, you can do so on the official site.
If you can’t wait to check out more from the game, why not keep an eye on our guide to the 2XKO release date and our list of all currently confirmed 2XKO characters.
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