Rivals of Aether
Fair · Short indie · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
WAIT.
A BANGER at $5.72, only fair at $14.99.
- Length
- 1.7h
- Value
- $8.82/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, DirectX Compatible graphics card with at least 32MB of video memory, 297 MB of storage. Windows only.
RIVALS OF AETHER is an indie fighting game where warring civilizations summon the power of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. Play with up to four players either locally or online.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $3.74. That was December 2018. It has been discounted 69 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 50 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today's $14.99 at 50 percent off still sits 301 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history. The math puts its BANGER price at $5.72. The record reaches that level 4 times.
Take the discount away and it is a 54. With it, 67.
On value it sits in the top 4 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Nidhogg ($9.99, scores 76) beats it on value, while it beats Rivals of Aether II ($14.99, scores 45).
Steam's global achievement data says about 17 percent of players ever finish it. On a 1.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 23 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2022 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 748 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 478 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 78 percent of the 1,498 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 1.7 hours. Doing everything runs 86, 50 times as long.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 1.7 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
49% start to 17% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
285 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This game has infinite replay value, gorgeous spritework, and beautiful music. I think I'm probably gonna be playing this game til I'm old and gray. My PC can barely run it so I find myself doing Remote Play more often than not, but it works great. Workshop characters and stages add an infinite amount of depth to the game, as well. Amazing pickup either on sale or at retail!
smash bros but literally any character in fiction can be playable, even the ♥♥♥ tetris blocks
game sucks with muiltplayer all the damn tryhards and cant even get fair matchmaking
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Rivals of Aether scores 67/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/383980/rivals-of-aetherThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.