Developer: Bandai Namco Studios
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Release Date: June 02, 2017
MSRP: $59,99
ESRB: Teen, PEGI 16
Players: 1-8 (Single Player, Local Versus, Online Versus)
Available Platforms: PS4 [Reviewed], Xbox One, PC
Genre: Fighting
Injustice 2 or Tekken 7 is probably what you’re wondering. Good fighting games rarely come along, but now we got two of them releasing within 17 days of each other. Both of them are great choices. Tekken 7 is more balanced than Injustice 2, but not quite as feature rich and suffers from multiplayer problems.
Here are the key features of Tekken 7:
- Story: “The Mishima Saga” – the story mode consists of roughly 1 hour and 20 minutes of cutscenes with fights in between them. The fights take up roughly 40 minutes. On low to medium difficulty this mode only takes 2 hours to beat. It’s not very long but the cutscenes look visually appealing and well made. You also unlock “Character Episodes” that consist of one fight and an ending for each character.
- Online: You can play 1v1 ranked, 1v1 unranked (with random players or friends), and a tournament mode (up to 8 players fighting in 1 vs. 1 matches until only the best player remains).
- Offline: Arcade Battle (fight 5 opponents in a ladder mode), Treasure Battle (rank up your characters in endless encounters), VS Battle (play against CPU or friend), Practice Mode.
- Customization: customize your characters and your online profile emblem. There are many customization items available to change the visual appearance of all fighters.
- 36 Characters in the starting roster + 1 DLC Character “Eliza”.
You do get a very fair amount of content for your money. The starting roster is fantastic and each character has an insane amount of combos. You can view the move list of a character and they have around 100 combos each. After playing a character for days you may still find new ways to connect combos and improve your tactics.
Getting started is not too difficult thanks to practice mode. You can view a video clip of every combo in the move list and display the button prompts on-screen. This makes it easy for newcomers to learn some combos with their favorite characters. What I find especially useful is that every character has one or more 10-hit combos in their move list. It allows you to practice long combos from the beginning without having to figure them out on your own.
The story battles are a bit disappointing. Many of them have you fight the same minions over and over again. Those are low level NPCs that die much quicker than normal opponents. Defeating a bunch of them in a row will win the match and trigger the next cutscene. The main focus of the story is on the cutscenes rather than the fights. It consists of 14 chapters, an epilogue and a “special match”. The special match unlocks after the story and proves a nice challenge — it’s much harder than the story matches.
The so called “Character Episodes” are also part of story mode. As you play through the story you will unlock new episodes. They reveal what happened to the characters that weren’t part of the main story. They consist of one quick match and a funny ending. Personally, I really enjoyed how entertaining they were.
The offline modes come as no surprise. They are what you probably know from previous Tekken games. Treasure Battle is like Ghost Battle in Tekken 6. You fight endless waves of opponents to gain new character ranks. The fights get harder the further you rank up. The ranks are character-specific and not profile wide, so each one of them must be ranked up individually.
Customization in Tekken 7 is really fun. You can trade in-game money for new customization items. Money is quickly earned from Treasure Battle or by completing different game modes and online matches. There are tons of visual customizations spanning across headwear, hairstyles, hair accessories, glasses, face paint, shirts, pants, full body outfits and upper body accessories. A lot of these look quite funny and colorful. The customization can then be equipped before matches. It’s a nice touch to keep things interesting over time. In comparison to Injustice 2, however, there aren’t nearly as many customization options.
To sum it up so far: there’s a lot to do, nice story cutscenes, a solid starting roster, balanced combat and a crazy amount of combos. I absolutely enjoyed Tekken 7’s offline modes.
Now let’s talk about the not so pleasant things. The biggest problem is the Multiplayer – more specifically, ranked matches and unranked player matches. Even when putting the search options to “Any” it fails to connect almost every match. I had tried for 30 minutes to get a working match in ranked through the match list. It gave me connection errors for 30 minutes straight and not a single working match. Then in “warm-up” mode (you fight a CPU dummy while searching for players) I finally found a match after 20 minutes. This is happening to a lot of people. The error “Connection to the opponent has been lost” comes up in 99/100 matches. It’s not others declining the match either. I tried with 2 PS4’s sitting next to each other. I could find my other account in both match list and warm-up but it gave me connection errors every time. The multiplayer is almost unplayable at release. To make things worse, when you do find a match it often ends in a disconnect after 20 seconds. This, again, is from bad server architecture and not people disconnecting.
In Tournament mode the game seems to work much better. I had hardly any issues, although once or twice it just said that everyone exited the match. In comparison to the other modes it works much better. Private invite-only matches worked without problems. I never had any disconnects in those.
If you don’t care for ranked matches then it’s not going to be a problem. If you do, be prepared for some of the worst multiplayer of your life.
Another big concern, especially when just having played Injustice 2, is how extremely long the loading times and pre-match animations are in Tekken 7. Honestly, it takes more time to load up a match than the actual fight is going to last (especially in Multiplayer). Injustice 2 had 2-3 seconds loading screens before matches. With Tekken 7 it’s several long loading screens and unskippable transitions. The final loading screen takes about 20 seconds which is just unacceptable. From a technical standpoint, there is much to be desired here.
For trophy hunters the game will be a joy. Unlike most fighting games, the platinum is very quick, easy, doesn’t require much online play and not a lot of farming. It takes roughly 10 hours to obtain the platinum trophy. Even if fighting games aren’t your thing you’ll find Tekken 7 to be an achievable platinum and it’s enjoyable from start to finish. The multiplayer trophies are very basic, requiring you to win only one ranked, one unranked, one tournament match and 10 matches of any type. Other than that it’s your usual fighting game trophies for beating the story, doing certain attacks, map transitions and leveling up a character to warrior in offline treasure battle.
| Gameplay *Overall Enjoyment Factor, Fascination with Game World, Level Design, Variety, Playability, User-Friendliness (Ease of Use / Readability / Controls / in-game Tutorials / Menus) |
| 10/10 Well Balanced Fighters. The classic Tekken gameplay every fan of the series loves. Tons of fights and combos. Easy to get started thanks to 10-hit combo tutorials in practice mode, hard to master. So far one of the most accessible fighting games for players of all skill levels. |
| Story/Multiplayer *Quality of the Singleplayer Story, Cutscenes and/or Multiplayer Modes (whichever is available). If a game has no Story or no Multiplayer it won’t be rated (thus no negative effect on score). |
| 5.5/10 Story: 10/10 – One of the best campaigns in a fighting game. Beautiful cutscenes. Multiplayer: 1/10 – Always fails to connect to other players in ranked/unranked matches. It’s unplayable at release. Only private matches working. |
| Technical Aspects *Graphics, Texture Quality, Character Details, Lighting, Weather Effects, Animations, Loading Times, Number of Loading Screens, does it run smoothly |
| 8/10 It looks gorgeous (especially the cutscenes), but the loading screens take too long (often longer than the match itself). |
| Value *Amount of Content, Production Quality, Replay Value, is there enough content to justify a purchase |
| 9/10 Huge starting roster, many combo attacks, plenty customization options. Not as much as Injustice 2 though. |
| Trophies/Achievements *Rates how much fun the Platinum / 1000 Gamerscore is to achieve: Are trophies fun to do? Do trophies restrict freedom of gameplay? Missable trophies? Multiple playthroughs required? Luck-based trophies? Pointless farming/grinding? Glitched Trophies? Are stats/trophies tracked correctly? |
| 10/10 From all the fighting games I have played this one is the least grindy, most enjoyable platinum. Highly recommended for trophy hunters! |
| Extraordinary Score Increase or Deduction *Reserved for extraordinarily good or bad features that the other categories don’t cover (such as game-breaking bugs). This score is directly added/subtracted from the final score. |
| Nothing |
VERDICT:
Tekken 7 is a well-balanced fighting game with a fantastic starting roster and crazy amount of combos. The customization is fun and there’s more than enough content to justify a purchase if you’re a fan of the genre. The only things holding the game back are the long loading times and connection problems in multiplayer. Trophy hunters will be pleased with a quick and enjoyable platinum trophy.
FINAL SCORE:
8.5/10
Played on PS4 Pro (also tested on normal PS4) with Patch 1.02, tested all modes and platinumed the game. A free review copy was provided. This review is based on the first 10 days after launch. Online stability may improve over time.