Rivals of Aether is the best Super Smash Bros clone for pc

Source: Aether Studios

Rivals of Aether was released in 2017 and served as the go-to for newcomers and veterans of the platform fighting genre. The game uses high quality pixels to animate the fighters and move sets. Not only does the game have an abundance of game modes to master, it's only $30.

Game Modes

• Story Mode

  • The story mode is pretty standard with it's use of character missions. So, that's a total of 18 playable character missions. It tells the backstory of the elements used in the narrative and gives the fighters some character.

• Abyss Mode

  • The Abyss mode come with two modes to choose from. Abyss Versus is a standard 1-4 online multiplayer mode where you can pick certain abilities to assist you in battle. Abyss Endless is a more challenging single player mode that advances in waves. You fight NPCs and earn coins to purchase abilities to help you progress farther. There are online leaderboards to show off your highest round.

• Tether

  • This mode essentially throws tetherball into the mix of fighting with a few twists. For starters, each player has unlimited lives and only scores when the tetherball is wrapped up clockwise or counterclockwise (depending on the side you are on). Payers can play in sets of 1,3,5,7, or 9.

• Online

  • The online mode comes with three different modes to queue into, Team Match, Friendly Match, Exhibition Match, and Ranked Match. The Team match lets you fight 2v2 against online opponents. Friendly match only allows you to fight your friends, there is no queuing session as you just join your friends in a lobby. Exhibition is essentially a casual online mode. In this mode, you can see what character the opponent has chosen. Ranked mode is the recognizable hardcore mode in any online game. It has a total of 6 rank tiers and 5 ranks within each tier.

• Tutorial

  • The tutorial allows you to practice basic fighting moves for each character and has practice matches against the CPU.

Modding

The most appealing aspect of this game is the modding community on steam. As of right now, there are a total of 3,200 custom characters on the Steam workshop. These characters range from 2B, Samus Aaron, Kris and even Kirby. Depending on the modder, the characters are incredibly intuitive and offer different fighting styles that are unrecognizable to the base roster. It essentially acts as free DLC characters.

On top of the characters, there is also a plethora of stages. There are more mods for "advanced stages" (3500) than there are "standard stages" (466). Some of the most popular include stages from franchises like Undertale, Pokémon, and Terraria. These stages can also include music from there respective source material depending on the modder.

It's also worth mentioning character skins are also moddable. While there aren't many as they simply pertain to the main cast. It does spice up the roster a bit with different styles for each standard character.

Overall

The game is an excellent alternative for it's animations alone and style alone. The game modes are still populated and can offer endless grinding if you are into it. On top of everything, the modding community is what keeps this game alive and recognized within the platform fighting genre. There are thousands of high quality characters that can be downloaded into the game and bolster the standard roster for free. The game is also available on the Nintendo Switch.