In 2XKO, Caitlyn is free to unlock, but there’s a twisty catch

With the 2XKO console release, Riot Games’ League of Legends-themed tag-team fighter has officially launched into its first Season. With this, the 2XKO roster has grown to 12. With the addition of Caitlyn, the gun-wielding Sheriff of Piltove and another Arcane heavy hitter, Riot has sought to broaden the roster of 2XKO characters.

I’ve heard she’s fun to play, but unfortunately, I wouldn’t actually know, because I haven’t unlocked her. Unlike other free-to-play games like Marvel Rivals or Overwatch 2 that release their heroes for free, Riot Games keeps its own agenda, where you have to work to play 2XKO’s Caitlyn. You can get her for free, but you’ve got to put in the work.

Free 2XKO characters, for a price

If you want to unlock any member of the 2XKO roster, you’ve got three main ways of doing it. You can drop one of the character unlock tokens you get for joining up or doing some early warm-up missions, you can build up enough free credits from missions to invest them, or you can put some real-world money into KO Points. 

During Caitlyn’s Champion Recruitment Event, there’s another way. If you build up 10,000xp in the Champion Recruitment Event, which you get for completing daily and weekly missions, then you get Caitlyn added to your unlocked 2XKO characters free of charge.

This all seems pretty fair considering that as you build up to 10,000xp, you’d be earning 10,000 credits anyway, which is as much as you’d be spending on a new character. By pushing to unlock Caitlyn to add to your 2XKO roster, you’d have enough credits to expand it by another step.

There are a few wrinkles within this bevy of good news, however. First, Caitlyn’s Champion Recruitment Event doesn’t run for the whole season. You’ve only got the first three weeks to get her into your party as a free unlock, and if you want to get enough XP in that time, you’re going to need to focus your attention.

The war on casual players

The daily and weekly missions system is pretty standard in free-to-play games, such as Riot Games’ very own Valorant. In 2XKO, a daily mission gives 250xp, while a weekly mission gives 800xp. With three dailies and three weeklies refreshing, you can earn 7,650xp a week. 

If you’re devoted to actually logging on and putting in the work every day, you’ll have Caitlyn shortly into that second week, which is plenty of time in the three-week Champion Recruitment Event. If 2XKO is going to be your game of choice, you’ll find it a generous master.

However, for the more casual players like myself, this requirement feels near unattainable. One of my first weekly tasks was to play 30 matches in a matchmaking lobby, which doesn’t sound that bad, but doesn’t fit into my schedule at all.

I’ve found it averages to around six minutes to find and then actually play through a match, varying based upon how quickly you can find a game and how evenly matched you are. That comes to about three hours to complete that weekly quest alone, let alone all the added dailies and particular playing requirements like ‘30 grabs’.

It feels like a bad time trade-off when I’m still in the stage of trying out 2XKO  and seeing if it’s a good fit. I don’t want to devote buckets of time to it, but I still want to try out the new character to see if it’s worth recommending.

In any game, you pay with time or money

It can be very easy to see 2XKO’s free-to-play grind as a part-time job. I could log my hours and then eventually get rewarded with a new fighter. However, I can also just take the fast route, buying KO Points and skipping the hassle.

As we’ve established, that will cost between $8.69 (£7.39) and $9.98 (£8.50), depending on how many KO Points you want to buy at once. As I’ve now unlocked nine out of the 12, I could just gather the 3,000 KO Points to buy the remaining 2XKO characters all at once.

Maybe if I spend enough money, my 2XKO roster might actually have enough fighters to feel fleshed out. Let’s say I bought KO Points at the best price, 11,500 for $99.99 (£84.99), for that I could have eleven whole characters and a stage.

On top of my already unlocked fighters, I’d have 20 whole 2XKO characters, almost as many as Dragon Ball FighterZ‘s initial 21 characters, and for only double the standard RRP. 

I just have to hope they don’t get as ambitious as Super Smash Bros Ultimate with their final roster count of 82 unique fighters. I’d need a whopping 73,000 KO Points to catch up. At its cheapest, that’s $634.37 (£539.47) – one heck of an investment. 

Battle passes are optional, but terribly tempting

I’m sure you see my issue. Right now, you can play a bit, unlock the credits, and get a free character if you want to really hammer down a Champion Recruitment Event. With only twelve characters in the 2XKO roster, it’s a small ask, but that’s only going to grow with every season, and paying might be the only way to catch up.

Not to mention the 2XKO battle pass hanging over all of this. Each time you could buy Caitlyn for 1,000 KO Points, or for 3,500 you could get her, a skin, and the premium battle pass. 

Even if you got Caitlyn for free, by the time you unlock her, you’re already 12 or so levels on the battle pass. That hard work is going to go to waste if you don’t drop some KO points to let you unlock the ten items on the battlepass you’ve already earned but can’t get for free.

The interconnected systems want to tease you into spending money. If dropping $30.41 (£25.87) on 3,500 KO points every 10 weeks is what works for you, then fine, but it sets off so many alarms for me.

The gating off of cosmetics is one thing, but having to unlock fighters is just keeping gameplay behind locked doors. If 2XKO maintains this trajectory, it won’t be long before 2XKO is just completely unassailable for new players, or even casuals like me.

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