Perfectly bearable
(This
review contains minor spoilers!)
Sometimes fighting games can feel like a dime a dozen.
Between the Street Fighters, Mortal Kombats and everything in
between, it doesn’t become long before they all start to blend together into
basically the exact same game over and over again. You pick your favourite dude
or dudette from the character select screen, learn their combos (or the most powerful
move that is the easiest to pull off), and then put it away. While I love the
genre, it’s hard not to admit it’s fallen into something of a slump outside of
the competitive scene in recent years.
Although it’s not going to break any
records or single-handedly bring the genre back to its glory days, Tekken 7 is a honey of a game that left
me feeling pawsitively delighted.
As someone who’s never touched the Tekken franchise outside of last year’s Pokken Tournament, I found the gameplay
to be thankfully simplistic compared to other franchises. While each character
has a laundry list of insane combos the truly savvy can pull off, the game is
simple enough that anyone who’s never played a side-scrolling fighter before
will feel right at home with a little practice. Each button corresponds to one
of your characters arms or legs, and pressing them individually will throw a
punch or kick. Depending on where your character is standing you can throw low,
medium or high attacks, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Low
attacks are harder to pull off, but break through shields. High attacks leave
you a sitting duck if you are blocked, but they have the potential to deal very
heavy damage. Medium attacks are pretty standard, dealing average amounts of damage
while still being blocked by shields. The system can get pretty complex once
combos and special moves are thrown into the mix, overall the system makes it
very easy to get your bearings.
Tekken
7 boasts a hefty amount of playable characters, each with their own unique
and fun abilities. There are a lot of fun and creative characters here,
including a dude in a mech, Akuma of Street
Fighter fame, and even a panda. Yeah, just a regular ordinary panda.
There’s a grizzly bear too. It’s amazing. I’m basically unstoppable as either
of them.
Even better, the characters are almost
infinitely customizable. Each one has an enormous list of cool outfits and
accessories you can dress them up in, from retro 3D glasses to silly hats.
Instead of being limited to what palette swaps the creators make, you can
freely create the character you want to play as.
You have to unlock the majority of the
costumes however, in what is easily the best mode of the game: Treasure Mode.
This mode is a gauntlet of foes you must get through, and defeating them net
you treasure chests with goodies. It’s a lot of fun to climb the ranks and
fight tougher and tougher foes and see what more insane gimmicks will be thrown
at you, like super speed battles and high damage mode.
Less entertaining is the story mode,
which I’m pretty sure will only appeal to longtime Tekken fans. I don’t know anything about the characters or who they
are, and the plot didn’t help me learn much. Equally annoying is the fact that
you spend significantly more time watching cutscenes instead of actually
playing the game in this mode. At no point did I have any clue what was going
on, so I lost interest fairly quickly and played more treasure mode instead.
Easily the most grizzly part of the
game, however, is the Online modes. Getting your confidence destroyed by people
online is as fun and soulcrushing as it always is, but actually finding a match
is harder than taking on a real bear. More often than not you’ll be alerted
that an opponent has been found, and then be promptly disconnected from them
and tossed back into matchmaking. Sometimes you’ll actually make it into a
battle, get halfway through, and then be booted back to the menu for some
unknown reason. When you actually manage to find and stay connected to a match
it’s just as fun as playing offline, but the challenge of actually getting to
that point makes me feel that I can’t recommend this game if playing online
matches is a big selling point for you.
While Tekken
7 can feel a little “been-there done-that” when it comes to the game mechanics,
it’s one of the most fun classic-style fighters I’ve played in a really long
time. The variety in the character selection and customization is unmatched in
the genre, the fighting is delightfully simple yet still packing a lot of
complexity, and Treasure Mode is a blast. I also think that fans of the
franchise will enjoy Story Mode, but as I don’t know anything about Tekken lore it just wasn’t for me. If
the devs fix the online servers to cause less crashes, I think this has the
potential to become one of the fighting game champs.
FINAL SCORE
8/10
Great
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