After a long break since Tekken 5, the King of Iron Fist Tournament is back, this time in high definition. The question is whether it has anything to offer for the fighting game fan over its predecessor – and my answer is yes, but not a huge amount. There’s online play, of course, and there’s a more extensive single player adventure (which is still a poor man’s brawler – any of the recent super-hero games are better than this), more characters and more polygons and shiny textures. The fun level is about the same – so if you enjoy the series this is a decent upgrade, and if you don’t then Tekken 6 certainly won’t change your opinion of it.

Tekken belongs very much to the button-masher school of fighters; by which I mean that to execute a combo you generally press a sequence of buttons in quick succession and your fighter carries the combo out, as opposed to the shorter instant control moves in games like Street Fighter or King of Fighters where longer combos require expert timing and lots of quarter-circle-button-presses to pull off. Because of this Tekken doesn’t need any sort of arcade stick to be playable – and in fact it seems more natural on a DualShock than an arcade stick. But I find it also means that the fighting feels much more out of my control because my character is doing things even when I’m finished pressing buttons. The absolutely massive move list for each character also makes it impossible to learn even one character really well, let alone any reasonable number of the 40 or so available. Add to this the fact that your opponent also has a huge number of options available and the matches seem to devolve into random guesswork and blind hope. Of course, I’m a rubbish Tekken player so this might colour my judgment, but I haven’t found Tekken 6 compelling enough as a “serious” fighting game to really want to get better.

Great for casual gaming

The same reasons that I’m not keen to try and improve my Tekken skills are what also makes the game highly suitable for casual living room play and the reason it’s been such a popular series on consoles. The huge move list means that mashing just about any combination of buttons will do something, and the chances are that what happens will look really cool. For example, just pushing square and X together does a grab (and pressing circle and triangle together does a different one), and each character’s grabs have really impressive and completely different animations, so there’s always great action to watch on screen. The combination of moves that happens when you simply press a sequence like square-triangle-x is about as graphically impressive as a combination that would take quite some time to master in the old arcade fighters (or even this year’s Street Fighter 4). Because of this the game is great for newcomers and for pass-the-controller-round-the-couch gaming, but at the same time it’s really difficult to improve at.

Tekken 6 includes a Scenario Campaign mode (as well as the Arcade Mode, Team Mode, Survival Mode and Online Mode) which is a set of scenarios in which you fight waves of enemies in the style of a third-person action brawler. It’s a very average brawler, mainly because there is hardly any freedom of movement and no area attacks – all moves are the same moves as in normal fights and you can only fight one enemy at a time despite there being quite a few on screen at certain points. As you fight you pick up new gear which you can equip on Lars (the main character) or your partner Alisa, which makes things a little more interesting, but overall this mode is lackluster. I would much prefer more time spent developing helpful tutorials or challenges that teach you how to play the game properly than to do more button-mashing brawling.

Old favourites

There is a story which is something about a tournament where people fight to see who can fight the best. There’s also a story in the Scenario Campaign that is slightly more fleshy, but I still couldn’t really understand what was going on so in the end I just ignored it and mashed my way through. I think all the story is there for in fighting games is to make you go “huh?” and laugh about how random it is. Tekken certainly has its share of randomness, like a fighting bear, a guy with a tiger-head and a guy that looks like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. Of course all the other old favourites are still there, like Wang. Ok, he’s not a favourite but he’s definitely still there. Jin Kazama, Heihachi, and some other guys like Bob, Eddy, Jim, Skip and Bo also make an appearance. I might have made some of those names up (although they could also be characters), but it’s not like I can really tell who’s who in Tekken apart from the main memorable characters – there are a lot who look similar to each other.

Despite my various complaints, Tekken 6 is a good fighting game and a worthy purchase if you like fighting games but don’t have the arcade stick you need to get value out of Street Fighter 4, or if you don’t have any fighting games on your PS3 and want something that will go down well with a bunch of friends hanging out in your lounge looking for a fun, competitive, non-combat fight and don’t already know Karate. Between Namco’s two series I still prefer Soul Calibur 4 over Tekken 6, but there is certainly enough difference between them to warrant owning both, and you can’t really go wrong with either.

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