Of two minds on this game. The base game, is very bland and honestly not good at all. The music is great, but the pixel art while appealing lacks any readability. It's very difficult to react to certain options because the resolution is so low everything ends up looking the same. Not that it actually ends up mattering much, because it has that same smash problem where there's very little reason to use most moves. See, in every smash game the value of each hit is attributed post hoc. It has to be, that's what percent does. But also, due to the nature of the games general structure (or lack thereof) of di and on hit situations, technically you could die at 0 anyway. It's kind of a "watch what happens" type deal. How this intersects with move choice is that functionally, you just have to have a hitbox out. There's a large mechanical overlap in moveset that just happens because there's a palpable unwillingness to add any sort of extra properties to moves. A characters forward air can fill the role of their entire moveset, with maybe one gap. And it feeds into itself because being in the air in a platform fighter grants a kind of versatility that's unquestionable.

In short, the games just kind of boring and weird. Almost every move launches at the same angle. The weak hitstun and tumble states are the same in this game, which means that if you get clipped by any move you're stuck in like a bunch of dead transitional frames and it can be impossible to get away from someone who's rapidly attacking. They knew they messed up because combo di in this game is insane. It's the opposite of slap city, where combo di in that game doesn't really matter most of the time, but survival di does. Well in roa, you aren't surviving anything. Characters fall like bricks, and di'ing into the corner isn't particularly good.

But, this game has mods. And that's actually enough to make me want to play it. I like this games modding scene, it's basically platform fighter Mugen! And really, that's a lot of fun. So I like this one