Tekken 7 Review

Then there's the Rage Arts system, which functions along the same lines as a comeback mechanic. Get pounded enough and you'll start glowing red, letting you perform special Rage moves or your Rage Art move, which is a high-damage attack that'll tear the camera away and follow you around as you pummel your enemy with a series of hard-hitting blows. This isn't an instant win button but instead a way to even the odds; players using it frivolously can be punished with several moves, meaning that if you try to treat it that way, it'll likely be lights out.

The biggest addition, and something that I've quickly become a fan of, is the Power Crush. Each character has several Power Crush moves, and they're quite special: Attacks flagged as Power Crush let you continue your attack even while you're being hit by mid and high attacks.

This let me push an advantage on a player, which was particularly useful when playing bigger characters, as trying to attack faster characters often led to death by a thousand cuts as I tried to get close and was repeatedly zoned out with a series of quick attacks. This way, I can take the damage still but use it to belt a guy upside the head. The other guy has a few seconds to get out of the way or use a low attack to interrupt.


So, that's Tekken 7's fighting. It does what it does very well, and although the learning curve is practically vertical, it also does what it does with some finesse, and it's hard not to be appreciative of what the developers are doing.

However, all of the work is being let down by the packaging around the fight system. Tekken 7 doesn't have a wealth of content, and most of it is torn from the arcade version. There's an added story mode, but it's atrocious, as throwaway as it is difficult.


The idea is that the story mode would act as a tutorial, perhaps, but it often makes you fight several people in a row, and losing a single round against multiple opponents throws you back to a checkpoint. Also, you can hit a button in story mode that makes all of your moves trigger with a single button, meaning you're learning the game all wrong.

Aside from the story mode, which was so boring I couldn't force myself through it, there's an arcade mode which is short and sweet and a treasure battle which gives you money to customise your characters.


To launch a fighting game like this with such a lack of single-player content in the wake of Injustice 2, which sprayed great content everywhere like a firehose? There's a sense that Tekken 7 is just a little bit too late.

As a result, there's only the online battle mode to appeal, something with the high skill ceiling of all fighting games. Players looking for a single-player experience would be better served basically anywhere else, and although it's a competent brawler, it's hard to recommend this over the many other great fighting games that have launched or will launch throughout the year.

K.O.