Tekken 6 Review

We! Are! Faaamily!

Some of my fondest gaming memories from when I was younger involve the finger-crippling madness that was Tekken 3. For a group of dirt-poor students who barely had enough money to eat, the amount of time we’d end up drunk in front of our friend’s PSOne mashing buttons at one another could be referred to as “disturbingly frequent”.

So now I should say that up until Tekken 6 landed in my lap last week, Tekken 3 was indeed the last installment in the series I’d played. Although I’d always found Tekken‘s control scheme to be perhaps the best layout in fighting game history, I’d been cruelly woo’ed by Soul Calibur and it’s offspring ever since I’d obtained an Xbox.

So I’d built up a lot of personal anticipation for giving Tekken 6 a try. From what I could read, not a great deal had changed in the Tekken timeline since the end of Tekken 3 anyhow, so that wouldn’t cause any problems. Most of the characters I knew were still in it (what is Heihachi now, like 400 years old?) and the controls were the same as they’d always been.

Now Tekken, for whatever stage in video game technology it inhabited, has always been a good looking game, and T6 is no exception. Character models, environments and FMV are all beautifully sharp and well detailed. The detail put into the animation is also off the scale, and is clearly making good use of the hardware that the PS3 was throwing behind it.

Yup, roundhouse kicking a panda

But this is where things started to go downhill for me. To begin with, the load times will tax anybody’s patience. When the announcer declares “Get Ready To Fight”, and then takes 30 seconds to actually load the stage, I didn’t realise he was expecting me to take that long to emotionally prepare myself.

The character selection has gone absolutely insane. The console edition of Tekken 6 features 42 playable fighters, which is a range so dazzling that it’s almost difficult to know where to begin for someone who’s been out of the Tekken loop for a while. But the classic characters like Heihachi, Jin, Yoshimitsu and the ever present King are still on offer for those who might feel like they’ve stumbled out of their depth all of a sudden.

So this was where I started. Luckily my presumption about the control scheme had proved correct, so there wasn’t too much fumbling when it came to getting a hold on the characters, but a great deal of the flow seemed to have gone out of the combat. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing considering that it makes multiplayer a little less about button-mashing, but a bad thing because part of button-mashing is initially learning available combos and building your fighting style from there.

Chain-guns: Amnesia-proof weaponry

A couple of forays online proved this to me. Although the basic control scheme hasn’t changed since I was a kid, the combat style of the game has, and resulted in my painful defeat time after time after time.

So, after being pointedly told several times how cheap playing as Bob was, it was offline play for me, and I’m afraid to say that there isn’t much in this game for someone flying solo.

To begin with, Tekken 6 has a campaign mode just for you soloists, and it is downright awful. Depending on your specified gender, you’ll take control of either Lars (a soldier in the Tekken Force) or Alisa (an android created by Yoshimitsu’s friend Dr Boskonovitch) and begin your quest to recover Lars’ memories. That’s right, after a pitched battle at the beginning of the story, Lars has *gasp* … AMNESIA!

The storyline is probably on par with an episode of Days Of Our Lives translated into Japanese and then back into English. It’s long, winding and dull as all hell. You could most likely put up with it, if it weren’t for the fact that the gameplay isn’t much chop either. It plays like a slightly off kilter Streets Of Rage, where the player moves along a set path, beating up henchmen, collecting items and weapons stashed in breakable crates. When the player reaches the end of a level he faces off against one of the many playable Tekken fighters, and if he survives he moves on to the next level.

Feel the fighting force of the double-cheeseburger!

While in theory it’s not that terrible an idea, put into practice the controls feel clunky, it’s difficult to co-ordinate attacks from multiple opponents, and every now and again you’ll accidentally get thrown in a river, insta-killed, and be forced to begin the whole sordid affair again. And when the load times are as bad as I mentioned, it gives you plenty of time to contemplate a rage-quit.

You can customise your character with different outfits that effect their stats, but for the most part I was simply enjoying dressing Lars like the most buff Elton John impersonator you ever saw.

So in the end, perhaps as it should be, I found myself simply playing through arcade mode over and over. This is where the soul of Tekken has always been, and it’s certainly the mode that had me nostalgia-ing at the beginning of this review.

And it’s still great fun. It’s like the comfort food of gaming. Depite the new characters, slightly altered control set, shinier graphics and even more ludicrous plot, the time-honoured format of regular fighters to sub-boss to big boss will bring you back time and time again.

And if you’re having trouble defeating the big boss, Azazel, which is apparently quite a common complaint, just remember that he doesn’t seem to be able to defend himself from continual hop-kicks (or as my old housemate would call it: outrageous bitch-tactics).

In the end, if you’re a fan of fighting games, this is probably one of the best titles on the market and it’s definitely a must buy. However, if you’re not that enthused with fighters, or only play them casually, then there are plenty of other (far cheaper) options that will satisfy.

The Verdict:

Pros: Fantastic visuals that run with a highly decent frame-rate. Plenty of variety with characters and a control system that’s as easy to learn as it is difficult to forget.  It’s easy to find a sparring partner online.

Cons: A very steep learning curve for playing online (even at the lower levels of matchmaking), coupled with the difficulty of learning 42 sets of strengths and weaknesses. The story mode is complete and utter fluff. Loading times could really use some work.

Overall: It’s a fantastic fighter, and any fan of the Tekken series as a whole will probably enjoy it, but it demands more than a casual fan probably has the effort to put in. I’ll give it a 3 out of 5. Definitely a game you should try-before-you-buy.