Tekken It To The Next Level: Tekken 7 Review

Family fights, weird animal fighters, and various devils, Tekken has always been a bit over the top but awesome. It is a game with which I have a lot of fond memories. Starting from Tekken 3, I’ve played almost all the Tekken games barring Tag-Tournament and was very excited to hear that Tekken 7 was going to be released on PC but was sceptical about whether or not it would run well on the PC. After playing through everything the game had to offer, here’s what I thought about it.

Starting with the Story Mode. The story was honestly quite good and revealed a lot about certain characters which gave them more depth and was good character development. At first, it seemed pretty bland but it picked up towards the end and felt somewhat satisfying. The story itself was quite short and revolved only around certain characters like most previous Tekken titles.  But that didn’t mean I finished the game quickly, in fact, I felt it took me longer than it should have because of the absurd gameplay of the story mode. The gameplay in the story mode really annoyed me. You were either fighting lackeys like generic soldiers until you beat a certain number of them or you were fighting the main characters. Now that would’ve been fine if a) 1/3 of the story mode fights wasn’t with minions and b)the characters you fought were just too strong.  Now you might think I’m just bad at the game but that’s not the case here. The enemies had armour on their moves which meant that hitting them didn’t interrupt their attack, the wouldn’t even take damage a lot of times because of that and

The enemies had armour on their moves which meant that hitting them didn’t interrupt their attack, the wouldn’t even take damage a lot of times because of that and countering them was almost ineffective. This led to a lot of rage especially when you got them down to low health and they would just basically tank all your attacks without taking damage and then just spam lock you in some move until you either died or had the same health as them.  Sometimes, you even start the fight off at a disadvantage because you get hit in the cutscene and the fight start while you’re flying back. Some characters regenerate health passively while some had phases where if you got them down certain health, they would regenerate health and that screwed me over so many times because they would go down to a sliver of health and wouldn’t die because a phase was to be activated and wouldn’t and then they’d kill me.

Character stories are just 1 fight that starts with an intro text and then ends with a cutscene. Almost every story is in a pair that has two outcomes one from player A’s perspective if they win and one from player B’s when you win as them. Some stories are just there as filler that don’t really seem to serve any purpose while some of them have character development or story development for that particular character. It didn’t take me too long to get through all of them, it took me like about an hour to an hour and a half.  These battles were much easier as to compared to the main story mode. Arcade mode also exists separately that consists of 5 fights followed by the ends credits and that’s it. The variety of characters is pretty good with both old and new ones in the roster although players like Lei and Julia are missing. They will be adding old characters as free DLC later on so at least that’s good.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the gameplay. It is Tekken at its best, there’s no doubt about that. The Tekken mechanics have been refined to what to seems like the limit. The Rage system that was introduced in Tekken 6 has been expanded upon with Rage Arts and Rage Drives. Rage Arts are powerful attacks that uses up a character’s rage to deal a powerful “Special Attack”. This attacks can be blocked and dodged. The second option, Rage Drive is far more advanced, and each character has their own way of using Rage Drive. These are kinda like Super powered combos that also inflict a lot of damage.  There’s also a slow-motion effect that triggers when a player is on low health and both are attacking to show whose attack hits. This really adds to the tension of the match and leads to some great moments. Akuma is a greatly ported over character who feels just like how he is in Street Fighter and also has the EX bar. He doesn’t feel out of place in a 3D fighting game.

The game is an improvement over Tekken 6 in terms of visual fidelity but is not as good as Injustice 2.  Unreal Engine allows them to use a lot of flashy effects on their attacks and moves which turns out was always how I imagined it but it wasn’t like that. Levels designs are amazing, especially the Lava level which was one of my favourites with how great it looked. The Effects really stand out in this game and add a lot of “oomph” to the moves. The cathedral also was a great level where you could see the level of detail and how shining everything was now. The sound is on par with the visuals. The hits sound great and don’t fall flat while the sound effects really add to the flashiness of the moves. I really enjoyed the music in the stage that features electro, electro-rock and even orchestral choir type music. The music always fits the stages and really pumps you up.

Tekken 7 is a great fighting game but has a weak story mode. The fighting is absolutely top quality and one of the best you can get from a modern fighter and is the best in the series.

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