Tekken 6 Review

After 5 previous instalments to the series, Tekken finally graces the 360 with its presence. It strikes at a very difficult time however, with such quality fighting games as Street Fighter IV raising the bar can Tekken strike back with a falcon punch of its own?

Story:

Oh no, can we please just skip the story bit? Please? Umm, okay: after Tekken 5, Jin Kazama has taken over Mishima Zaibatsu, and his father - Kazuya Mishima - is annoyed that Jin is now interfering with his own (Kazuya's) ambitions to be a global superpower. Kazuya - head of the G Corporation - sticks a bounty on Jin's head and in retaliation, Jin announces King of Iron Fist Tournament 6 in order to crush his dad's retaliation and the G Corporation once and for all.

Whilst this is going on, the story mode drops Lars Alexandersson in an attempt to infiltrate and close down both corporations (by beating the snot out of everybody in his way) and to end the war. He amazingly stumbles on a sleeping female android thing called Alisa Bosconovich (what's with the long names?) and she becomes your side kick battling and meeting up with fellow Iron Fist competitors along the way.

As if that's bad enough, fighting two big evil corporations with more muscle bound henchmen and women than you can shake a stick at, with a companion straight from a science fiction novel and a demonic head of an evil organisation from the seed of a previous nutter ruler, he gets amnesia. What a time to get that, hey? Anyway, he meets up with his former mentor who guides you along your  journey when, oh my god, Lars slowly remembers that he is the son of Heihachi Mishima, now in solitude but still trying to retake control from Jin of Mishima Zaibatsu after being defeated last time around.

After all this, Jin bumps into your terrible twosome and reboots Alisa's memory and turns her on Lars. But no, it gets better, Lars bumps into this big crazy ass demon called Azazel now teamed up with someone called Raven, and confronts Kazuya, who finds out that he's Lars' half brother. After a tedious altercation, they bump into Jin - again - who sets the now evil minded Alisa on Lars and friend. After they kick the snot out of her, she becomes friendly, again (?), and they take the fight to Jin, again. Without ruining this gripping story more and to preserve what's now left of my pickled brain, I'll leave the story side right there...

Gameplay

The game is split into two types: one absolutely excellent, the other a tedious dreadfully boring and woefully unresponsive. We'll start with the negative side first as the good stuff is really, really good.

The previous Tekken instalments featured a game mode similar to the story mode on this game, which used to be called "Tekken Force Mode". This sees your character moving in 3rd person through city streets in 2 (and a half) D, attempting to punch people in the vague direction your character is facing. It's nigh on impossible to land any proper punches in this game as the lock on is woefully inaccurate. Want my advice, expect cack and you wont be disappointed.

Now, the good stuff. The arcade and battle modes which sees one enemy occupy one side of the screen each is absolutely superb. A genuine mix of tactics including blocking, running away, ducking and smacking mixed with some superbly satisfying combo attacks make this game brilliant. Add in the super smooth 360 controls (genuinely surprised at just how good they are in this game) and you've got one pleasurable ass kicking experience.

There's a mixture of modes and baddies - 42 charaters in fact - which should keep you coming for more. Modes include: standard 10 level arcade battle mode, as you fight through 6 iron fist competitors, a major Nancy robot (that's her name, she's not really something I'd call a nancy) and then through to Jin, title holder and on to the big Azazel "demon monster massive fill the screen so much you can hardly see the background" thing. Other modes are survival which sees you fight to death with your health carrying over (with a small boost) on to a never ending wave of competitors until you die, and team matches with upto 8 v 8 (elimination) first team to run out of competitors loses.

Lastly, there's now a means of customising your favourite character too with money earned from fights, lottery machine things and the story mode. It's small but it adds a very tiny layer of longevity to an otherwise pick up and play for a few minutes sort of game.

Graphics

Gorgeous. New 3d interactive, highly detailed backgrounds are now standard stuff in most fighting games, but rarely do they look this fluid, sharp and so good you could almost eat them.

Characters are well animated, detailed and perfectly formed with punches, kicks, powerbomb, summersaults and crazy breakdancing leg swinging all beautifully captured and realised. Moves appear to flow, and in game cutscenes look like hollywood blockbusters with typically over the top effects, situations, characters and locations.

Sound

Each different arena has a different accompanying sound track, my personal favourite is the yoddling "yoddle-aye, eee-ooh" where your fighting amongst sheep in a beautiful green grassed isolated haven. Music is very familiar in style to folks familiar with any of the previous instalments and are typically moody.

One thing that really is apparent though, is that every character in the  game is at minimum, bilingual and ignorant to anybody who doesn't speak their own native language. Japenese characters have full conversations, speaking only Japenese when an American competitor comes in, understands completely what the Japenese characters are on about but continues to talk English? When the conversation continues, the Japenese characters continue to talk in their national language and the whole thing becomes very confusing. A real shame if I'm honest, as it looks as if some money cutting jobs worth didn't bother to record the cutscenes in both languages (using dubbed actors - Jackie Chan movie stylee) which makes the story scenes in Story mode rather annoying rendering the game mode pointless.

Multiplayer

Tekken 6 allows full offline/online battle fighting one v one and also allows online only co operative play during the story mode. A slight critism though, is the lack of offline story play which seems a bit silly really, as both players (AI or online character) share the same screen anyway.

Still, this game was brought up on competitive arcade machines and it's where it succeeds most at. There are
different Xbox Live options including private matches, ranked and general public matches all of which are lag free, easy to jump in and out of and are pleasingly fun.

Summary

In closing, Tekken 6 is a triumph where it perfects and tweaks everything everybody loved about the series and fine tunes it to work seamlessly on Microsoft's machine. It's not my favourite instalment, that credit lies with Tekken Tag Tournament on the PS2 and it's certainly not without faults - story mode is the biggest black marker - however, all in all the year delay whilst the boffins held up the PS3 launch to get it fit and ready for us Xbox lark was certainly worth it. A must buy for a fan of the series and for anybody who's a fan of engaging stories and plots.

Okay, last bit may have been slightly sarcastic...