Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is easy: every technique in the game is visible from the first match and takes hundreds of hours in the hands.

Aim matters less than knowing what the other team can do to you, and the roster is large enough that this takes a very long time to learn.

Aggressive rather than punishing — dying costs you almost nothing, so the walls are boss-shaped and the rest is spectacle.

Building is a second game bolted to the first, played at a speed that looks like a bug, and the mode that removes it is where most people should start.

The movement is the skill ceiling and nothing in the game mentions it — the players beating you are using techniques that were never taught, only tolerated.

Driving it is a fraction of it. The car arrives on a setup that is wrong for the conditions, the game does not say so, and a lap that felt fine can be two seconds off because the tyre pressures were.

There is no block button — parrying is a direction plus an attack, aimed at the incoming blow, and the game tells you this once and then assumes it.

Rise apologises for nothing in its expansion — the endgame Anomaly hunts are the hardest sustained content the series has shipped.

The hardest thing here is unlearning defence — you cannot outlast anything, and the deflect window is the entire game.

Build orders are the curve, and the campaigns teach almost none of what the game actually asks for. The hard AI does not forget its economy while it fights.