Man, it’s been a really long time since I’ve played a Tekken game. Not since the days of Tekken 2 did all my buddies and me sit around that 19-inch dorm television in college as we beat the crap out of each other for hours upon hours. Released on October 27th, Namco Bandai’s Tekken 6 had me pretty excited as I hoped it would bring me back to the good ole days. Well I’d like to thank Namco Bandai for providing with a copy of the game to review for you, so let’s jump right in and see if Tekken 6 has all of that great nostalgic arcade beat-em-up juiciness we’ve come to expect!
Upon starting the Scenario Campaign, you are shown a long black and white summarization of the previous Tekken titles whose style really reminded me a lot of Sin City. Basically in the last Tekken, Jin takes control of the Mishima Zaibatsu and now he is using it to take over the world. His father Kazuya, who is in control of the G Corporation, puts a bounty on Jin’s head, and Jin responds by announcing The King of Iron Fist Tournament 6, in order to battle his father.
While this is going on, Lars, a soldier in the Tekken Force, leads a group of rebels to stop both the G Corporation and the Mishima Zaibatsu, and in doing so loses his memory and meets up with Alisa. These two begin a journey of self-discovery climaxing with all of the characters battling it out and blah blah blah. Really, the story is pretty retarded and I didn’t get into it at all. There were too many characters and I really didn’t care about any of them. But why should I? Tekken 6, like it’s predecessors, is an arcade style fighter. It doesn’t need a story anyway as far as I’m concerned.
What Tekken 6 lacks in Story, it absolutely makes up with TONS of content, all of which is extremely fun to play, except for the Scenario Campaign. In this mode, you are taken through the primary storyline of the game and control the characters in a 3d perspective with a mix of 2d and 3d controls that feels very unnatural and simply isn’t enjoyable at all.
Luckily, the game contains lots of additional online and offline content. The Arcade battle is your traditional 1v1, battle after battle until you reach the final boss game. Ghost Battle pits you against computer played characters that you’ve faced online. So if you run into someone with a large number of wins, their ghost will fight you with more skill. Vs. Battle lets you face a friend on the same screen and this is in my opinion the most fun because there’s nothing like beating the crap out of the guy sitting next to you. There is also a team battle mode that lets you designate up to 8 characters to play successively against your opponent, a time attack game to clear stages as fast as possible, a survival mode where you have to defeat as many foes as possible with a single life bar, and finally a very involved practice mode that lets you control all kinds of attributes and track your performance.
On top of this, you also have a whole bunch of online game modes and they actually run very smoothly. I found quick games to get into and never experienced any lag which is obviously a necessity in an arcade fighter like this.
With all of those different game types, you’re going to have a lot of play time, and you’re going to need it. I thought Tekken 6 was damn difficult until I got several hours into it when I started to figure out how to mash the buttons properly. Right from the start you’ll have access to all of the 42 different characters including 6 new playable characters, each with something like 80 plus different moves they can perform. You do the math and you’ll see you are going to have a LOT of learning to do if you want to master even a few of these fighters. Luckily, the complete list of moves is accessible to you from the pause menu. There is also a new rage mechanic so you’re your health gets low you start glowing red and deal additional damage, and this really made things intense and I felt it was a great addition to the game.
Now, the analog stick is just terrible as far as fighting goes. It is very unnatural and never works the way you want it to, so you’re forced to use the d-pad, which isn’t a bad thing, but I can’t help but wonder how much easier the game play would be if I had one of those awesome fighter stick controllers.
As you play the game, you’ll earn money which can be spent on new clothing and character customization options giving you limitless combinations so you can really custom build your perfect fighter. Finally, as you play through the Scenario Campaign, you’ll occasionally run into melee weapons, guns and flamethrowers that you can use to quickly mob through the enemies, which thankfully alleviates some of the repetition.
The graphics in Tekken 6 look amazing. They are some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen in an arcade fighter and I didn’t once notice a drop in frame rate. Throughout the Scenario Campaign, you’ll run into TONS of cut-scenes that all look amazing as well, but again, the story was so crappy that I couldn’t enjoy them as much as I would have liked to. Unfortunately though, there are some pretty bad loading times that occur ALL THE DAMN TIME, which likely can be remedied by installing the game to your hard drive.
Finally, the music in the game isn’t the best and the sound effects really didn’t mesh well with me. I just didn’t feel like they sync’d up with the moves and it kind of made me feel like I wasn’t really fighting. Even with the sound effects turned up, they were still really quiet.
Well, admittedly, I haven’t really been a big fan of arcade fighters for many years. Luckily, Tekken 6 gives you a TON of game play with just as much character customization and minus the Scenario Campaign, this game is actually pretty fun. The online game play runs flawlessly and finds opponents for you almost instantly and if you feel like playing with the guy sitting next to you, you have a bunch of different options as well. The graphics are great, the sound is poor, but all in all, I felt this was a pretty good game. Let me know what you thought by rating and leaving your comments below!
