Injustice 2 or Tekken 7 is probably what you’re wondering.
Tekken 7 review Pc#
Tekken 7 quickly ceases to exist for the solo player.Players: 1-8 (Single Player, Local Versus, Online Versus)Īvailable Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC If your fight buddies are thin on the ground, though, and the faceless world of online scrapping isn’t for you, think carefully. And if you’re willing to put in the work required to release that power-and have the friends on-hand to help-then I'd recommend it, no question. With another invested player in tow, it delivers a gratifying, hard-hitting time with the winsome giddiness of a party game. When Tekken 7 comes alive, it does so with a furious zest and capability. The story mode’s bizarre decision to furnish one-button macros for key special moves more than sees to that. It’s unlikely you’ll even learn anything by accident, too. 30 separate, single-fight ‘Character Episodes’ pad things out with a great deal more, much-needed personality, but damn if that doesn’t just flag more wasted potential. On top of that, there's a faceless, morphine-overdose of a narrator apparently aiming for an award-worthy parody of Bad Anime Acting. To get there, though, you’ll have to grind through two hours of simplistic, bluntly repetitive battles, as well as earnest yet meaningless chatter with who-the-hell-is-that-anyway characters. The story’s late stages feel like the adrenaline-fuelled and cinematic Matrix game we never got. As rivalries intensify, the action is seamlessly punctuated with narrative overlays upon decisive hits, with electrifying slow-mo close-ups highlighting key clashes. Most maddening is that the final chapters, when it eventually zones in on a purposeful, character-driven story thread and tells it through sustained, increasingly spectacular, multi-stage battles, get it really right, showing off Tekken 7 as a whole with defiant class and flair. Tekken 7, however, seems to understand the basics of this but not the purpose, delivering a short, incoherent and newcomer-hostile tale with a brutally disproportionate ratio of cutscenes to combat.
Tekken 7 review full#
For a full overview of our performance impressions, check out Ian's analysis. The game is locked to 60FPS and runs flawlessly on our GTX970, though adds black bars to ultrawide resolutions. There is no mouse support and keyboard controls are terrible, though you'd expect that of a fighting game.
Tekken 7 review how to#
This was almost perfected when NetherRealm introduced the idea in its 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot, showing that a narrative fighting game campaign can deliver a brilliantly creative, character-focused in-road to understanding how to play.
This would be acceptable if Tekken 7 didn’t squander its most promising concession to modern fighting games: the tragically inconsistent story mode. That the moves-list simply dumps the whole lot-around 80 per character, many of which are indistinguishable in purpose on first, uneducated glance-without any indication of power or functionality, suggesting a lack of overall care. Those wishing to learn the ins and outs of the game’s internal logic and flow are on their own. Comprising only the basics of a character-specific moves list and a training dummy that can be programmed with desired behaviours, Tekken 7’s training only really caters to players looking to hone the execution of known strategies.
While there is a training mode, it makes less effort to educate than a disinterested high school teacher who sticks on a video and catches up on marking until the bell rings. It's an instinct-driven ‘feel-fighter’ where learning the basics of a character is about exploration over academia. If Street Fighter is like fisticuffs chess, then Tekken’s faster, more explosive, more intimate and improvisational, laterally-focused game is like Geometry Wars with roundhouse kicks. If you're willing to put everything on the line, maybe it will. It’s logical, fair and makes total sense, but it also wants you to know that a ludicrous, woop-inducing turnaround can happen at any given moment. It’s an entirely more organic, sandbox-y fighter than the competition-a fluid, unpredictable and constantly exciting game of incredibly accurate hitboxes and anything-can-happen cause and effect. It wants you to experiment wildly with its vast array of subtly different, malleable attacks, parries, evades and counters. It wants you to try things, just for the hell of it. Where other fighting games are dominated by tightly defined rules of risk-and-reward, Tekken-while consummately, thoughtfully precise and balanced-prefers to give you a range of looser options in a more emergent, intricately reactive fighting system. For the uninitiated, Tekken’s combat focuses on freedom, openness, and breadth of possibility over strict, prescriptive hierarchies of attack and defence.