Tekken 6.

I'm going back to the medium I started my reviewing on all those years ago, Videogames. A little word of warning, I’m not all that great a gamer, I hate most of the popular game series (not in a pretentious make a statement way, I just think the games are overrated) and I hate video-gaming viewpoints like ‘God I die every two steps, great game!’ or ‘NES games = best games ever’ so this review may rub you the wrong way.

Now let me give you a little background of me and Tekken and fighting games in general. I was brought up on the Mortal Kombat fighting games which aren’t really taken all that seriously but elitist fighting game crowds (yes they really do exist) but my favourite fighting game is probably Dead Or Alive 2 which seems little talked about with fighting game elitists but I loved it nonetheless. Now I have played Tekken on the PS1 and I enjoyed it, probably mainly because of the wacky roster of fighters. However revisiting it on PS2 was disappointing, it was slow and clunky and had bad controls and so I never touched the series again. Street Fighter, the most popular fighting game series I believe is massively overrated, it’s much too difficult and the controls generally suck, in my mind, IV is no different and the game really disappointed me.

So you must be wondering why I’m reviewing Tekken 6 then, right? Well the answer is fate. Me and a friend of mine were in town killing time, a fighting game was on in HMV and we messed around on it and fell in love then by ‘chance’ the game was reduced to just under £25 in Game. I HAD to have it. I had no idea where the extra £15 came from in my account, but I’m not complaining because it gave me enough money to get the game.

So now a few days have passed and I’ve broken in the game and I simply love it. Combat is fast, fluid and brutal, the AI is challenging but not impossible (except the final FINAL boss in Arcade mode) the roster is huge (and absolutely insane) and available pretty much fully from the start with all the costumes so you don’t have to toil to get to the good stuff, characters appearances are fully customisable and some of the items you can buy for them have actual impact in the game, the controls are great, it plays off anime stereotypes (and I love it when they do that) and there are a great range of modes on offer. Even the frankly ass Scenario Campaign allows a fast track route to unlocking a load of new appearance items for free, so you have a great reason to play it.

So aside from usual fighting game flaws (steep learning curve, rather erratic difficulty, women who always kick your ass, imbalance between speed and power fighters unless you’re really good, singling out the good and bad players etc) and a rather imbalanced ‘Juggling’ system (don’t ever let a good opponent catch you in the air or it’s game over from there) and a near impossible arcade boss, what you have here is a bloody fantastic game and the kind of fighter I’ve been longing for.

Think about it!

-Locke