BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment PS4 TEKKEN 7 (R2) ENG (PS4)

Big roster, deep gameplay constantly being supported and updated by the developer. Safe bet for a fighter fan.Terrible for newcomers, no tutorials or anything like that really. Training mode has tonnes of tools for seasoned and competitve players but a completely new player will get lost in menus before they find anything useful.Single player modes are fine, basically just arcade, survival and story. Online is pretty much just casual and ranked. With that said I've managed to get literally thousands of rounds out of it and hundreds of hours. It really is a fantastic value proposition if you like fighters and have a familarity with Tekken, for everyone else, expect a steep learning curve. One that's well worth conquering

WARNING: If you're not a PS Plus member, you should evaluate carefully whether the offline content of the game gives you what you're looking for.The focus of this game are its online multi-player modes (even to the point that they reportedly added artificial input lag offline to make the timing more similar to the online experience). It also offers some single-player content, but less than previous Tekken games. Since this is not covered in great detail in professional reviews, the main focus of my review will be the offline content. I will also briefly cover the online modes and some general considerations.RosterThe roster consists of 36 characters (down from 40 in Tekken 6 and 59 in the non-canonical Tekken Tag Tournament 2). In addition, there will be at least 3 DLC characters available in the future. The game features 9 new characters (including Akuma from Street Fighter, who plays a lot like his SFIV version). I found most of those less interesting than the characters they replaced, but compared with many other fighting games the roster is still quite large and very solid.GameplayThe core mechanics were left intact, so that (even with the addition of some elements from 2D fighting games) Tekken 7 still feels very much like a Tekken game. Since Tekken 7 has been in arcades for more than two years prior to the release of the home version, the gameplay is very balanced and fine-tuned. There has been an effort to make the gameplay more accessible than Tekken Tag Tournament 2, which is something that people who are new to the series will appreciate. However, the game itself makes almost no effort to teach you how to play. There are enough tutorials available on the internet, though. Since there are a lot of Tekken veterans online, newcomers should not be surprised if they lose a lot of matches. The game has high-damage comeback mechanics that make it possible to turn a match around, but those can be used by the veterans as well.GraphicsTekken 7 can't quite keep up with the best-looking PS4 games, but it's still a beautiful game. The resolution is a little less than full HD and the game looks a bit better on the PS 4 Pro (reportedly, the PC version looks a lot better). The character models are not quite as detailed as in Dead or Alive 5 (the main 3D fighting game competition on the PS4). There are 20 stages. Some of them are very detailed and feature-rich while others look more like a copy of other stages. Interestingly, water and snow actually look better in the PS3 Tekken games. Some of the stages are also a bit too monochromatic for my taste.Single-player and local multi-player modesIn addition to the very solid traditional practice mode (which still doesn't show frame data, though), the game offers the following offline modes:VS BattleThis is strictly a local multi-player mode. Unlike other fighting games, Tekken doesn't allow you to fight against the CPU in its VS mode. This also means that Tekken 7 doesn't have a mode in which you can freely choose your CPU opponent, difficulty, stage and number of rounds for the next match. The mode also doesn't have a handicap option.Story modeThere's a cinematic story mode that lasts 2-3 hours. Some lengthy and boring narration aside, the presentation is quite good. It consists of narration and video sequences (which make a nice effort to include material from previous Tekken games) as well as occasional fights. The game offers assist functions and difficulty options for those fights. Nevertheless, there's a significant difficulty spike at the end. The story itself kind of gets the job done, but is ultimately B-movie material. Essentially, it's about two ruthless people (father and son no less) trying to kill each other, culminating in a bombastic final battle.Aside from the main story, there are short episodes for the characters that are not part of the main story. These consist of a short introductory text, a fight and a video ending (similar in style and tone to the arcade endings in previous Tekken titles) that focuses on the battle. On paper, the focus on one fight makes these episodes quite coherent. It also makes them very short, though. You can unlock all of the endings quickly, which left me with the feeling that there's not much more left to do here. Unlocking the arcade endings in the previous games took a lot longer.Once you've played through the story mode, it doesn't have much replay value.Arcade BattleThe arcade mode has been shortened to five matches, two of which are against boss characters. This makes the mode more repetitive than in previous games, because you are fighting the same boss battles over and over again 40% of the time (actually more than that because you can't skip some of the cutscenes). As a result, the arcade mode doesn't have much replay value, either. There are also no endings to unlock.Treasure BattleThis is the main single-player mode with replay value, but it is also plagued by some issues.Treasure Battle replaces Ghost Battle from previous Tekken games. Originally, Ghost Battle offered an endless battle mode that would allow players to simply have match after match without anything getting in the way. This has been somewhat compromised by the features that have been added (and removed) for Treasure Battle. Considering that it's the only single-player mode with replay value, Treasure Battle feels over-engineered to me. This is how it works:It's still an endless chain of battles, but after each win you'll get a chest (or several chests) that will contain unlocked customization items or extra fight money. Long winning streaks will give you more fight money and periodically more treasure chests to unlock. The stage will stay the same for a few matches. Occasionally, there will be matches under special conditions (double speed, double damage, damage coming only through juggles, opponents with special properties). Opponents have a rank, and consistently beating opponents of a similar rank or special opponents will increase the offline rank of your character.This focus on unlocking treasure and a more prominent role for the offline ranking system are probably the reason why a number of options from previous games have been removed: the options to choose the number of rounds, your next opponent and the difficulty of the AI, thus taking away your ability to customize the fighting itself.I find this lack of options unfortunate. It is particularly unfortunate when it comes to the difficulty settings, since the difficulty of the AI is now exclusively determined by the offline rank of your character. As long as your character rank is low, you're forced to fight easy CPU opponents. If you feel like taking on a challenge on one day and want to take it a little easier the next day, that's not possible because the algorithm to determine the difficulty will always be the same. If there are several people in your household who want to use the same character, they will get only one difficulty setting regardless of their individual skills. This will be particularly bad for people who rank their character up to a point where they're not comfortable with the difficulty of the AI anymore. From that point onward, that's the difficulty they are going do get. For experienced players, the Tekken AI is not very challenging, though. Most fighting games offer a greater variety of difficulty levels.You also don't have the option to avoid the special matches. If you enjoy them, that's fine. If you don't like them, you may find that annoying. Either way, you don't have a choice.This wouldn't be an issue if Treasure Battle wasn't the only single-player mode with replay value. But as your main mode it simply doesn't offer enough options to customize the fighting according to your personal preferences.A natural solution would be to add CPU opponents to VS mode. That would give you full control to fight as you wish, but alas, Tekken games don't have that, even though it's a standard feature in every other modern fighting game.However, if you actually enjoy treasure battles, the game offers you tons of stuff to unlock here. If you don't like the mode, you could just ignore it and focus on multi-player matches. Reportedly, all items will be unlocked after you have played 2,000 matches, regardless of whether or not they were treasure battles.Online multi-player contentI'll restrict myself to the most important points here. The netcode is pretty decent and I've not experienced a lot of lag so far (though I've heard some complaints from others). There are some connectivity issues, though. These have been addressed through patches, which has improved the situation.In terms of features, the most important changes are these: You can now start all online matches on your preferred side. This is a feature that a lot of players will appreciate and one area in which Tekken has really been innovative.They've also added a tournament mode that is similar to competitive fighting game tournaments. On paper, this is an interesting addition, but it leaves you inactive for much of the time. Accordingly, a lot of players will leave in the middle of the tournament. This is a serious issue because there is no host migration. If the host leaves (e. g., after being eliminated), the tournament will immediately be over. Unfortunately, this happens all the time.Additional contentThe game offers quite a lot of additional content: customization options, a jukebox, a gallery and a VR mode.CustomizationTekken 7 doesn't have quite as many customization options/items as Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament 2, but what we get is still decent. Characters will have a few individual outfits as well as generic outfits and items that are available to all characters. This includes "normal" stuff as well as silly items such as a pizza that you can put on the back of your character, a pile of bricks that you can put on their head, or a tulip that you can put in their hand. Those silly items don't go well with the atmosphere of most of the stages, but they are very much part of the style that Tekken is going for. While the game doesn't give you many options to customize the matches themselves, it gives you plenty of options to express yourself through character customization.JukeboxThis PS4-exclusive mode contains the music from all previous Tekken games, which can be used in Tekken 7 (which is great because the Tekken 7 OST is at best an acquired taste and will not appeal to everybody). There are presets and shuffle options for each game in the series as well as the ability to create your own presets. It's fantastic.GalleryThe gallery offers videos and illustrations from Tekken 7 as well as all previous Tekken games. They can be unlocked with fight money. There's a lot of content to be unlocked here.VR modeI can't say much about this, but it seems to be very rudimentary. You can watch all parts of the stage during matches or have a closer look at the character models.ConclusionThe gameplay is as fun as it ever was. The game offers a very solid multi-player experience as well as some nice additional content. The single-player content is disappointing, which may be a deal-breaker for people who only play offline. The game gets four stars because of the fun gameplay. If single-player content is all that is available to you or what you're primarily looking for, two or three stars would be a more appropriate assessment.

Best fighiting game frachise out there which I have been playing since I first bought a PS1. I was so excited for this and preordered as soon as it was available. It came on time and I got the Eliza DLC. I had high expectations for this game but I feel its not as good as it could be. The different fighting modes have not been included; there isn't time battle or team battle for example. This makes it hard when playing 2 player as you have to keep going back to the character select screen. Also the roster is definitely not as big as previous editions - they should definitely have some more DLC. Once you play through story mode there really isn't much else to do except treasure battle and considering how quickly I completed story mode on all levels of easiness (in the space of a fortnight), you kind of get bored of the game.The best thing is I think they have more clothes and accessories to kit out your characters and money is really easy to obtain by playing through treasure battle and arcade mode.All in all, this is still a great game to play with friends or family and one with a long-standing storyline if you've played right from the start!

I love the Tekken series, and the fighting aspect of this game is great.The rage mechanic has been altered, so instead of using the extra damage, you can unleash a devastating attack at the cost of the rage, which is a nice addition.The story mode is what has led me to give 4 stars instead of 5, I miss the scenario campaign modes as seen in other Tekken games, but this is justified in the sense that it brings the conclusion to the Mishima drama, but it felt too long winded for me.Online mode is very active, and there's a new game mode, tournaments; they could be better structured, but they are fun nontheless

This game suffers from interminable loading times between games. The gameplay is familiar and as fun as previous entries to the series, but the time between games turns that familiarity to ash in your mouth.Even if you disregard everything else, it still screams microtransaction farm. Good-bye Tekken, you will be missed.