Whichever you go for though, Rage means that every Tekken 7 fight stays exciting right to the very last second. The latter offer less guaranteed damage on hit unless you can follow up, but are much safer from retaliation if blocked. Arts are big, cinematic super-moves that will often finish your opponent, whereas Drives lean more towards powered up combo-openers. Available once your health bar gets low enough (there’s no managing multiple power gauges here, Tekken is much more straightforward than that), Rage will trigger, allowing you to launch one of two powerfully augmented, potentially tide-turning attacks. It’s an instinct-driven ‘feel-fighter’ where learning the basics of a character is about exploration over academia.Īlthough largely familiar, Tekken 7 does introduce a cool new system by way of its Rage Arts and Rage Drives.

If Street Fighter is like fisticuffs chess, then Tekken’s faster, more explosive, more intimate and improvisational, laterally-focused game is like Geometry Wars with roundhouse kicks. If you’re willing to put everything on the line, maybe it will. It’s logical, fair and makes total sense, but it also wants you to know that a ludicrous, woop-inducing turnaround can happen at any given moment. It’s an entirely more organic, sandbox-y fighter than the competition-a fluid, unpredictable and constantly exciting game of incredibly accurate hitboxes and anything-can-happen cause and effect. It wants you to experiment wildly with its vast array of subtly different, malleable attacks, parries, evades and counters. It wants you to try things, just for the hell of it. Where other fighting games are dominated by tightly defined rules of risk-and-reward, Tekken-while consummately, thoughtfully precise and balanced-prefers to give you a range of looser options in a more emergent, intricately reactive fighting system. But an improved version of a near-perfect thing is nothing to be sniffed at.įor the uninitiated, Tekken’s combat focuses on freedom, openness, and breadth of possibility over strict, prescriptive hierarchies of attack and defence. Of course it should be, given that its combat model is only a slight refinement of the expansive, immediate and free-flowing set-up perfected some time around Tekken 3 on the PlayStation.

When it purely comes to fighting, Tekken 7 is glorious fun.

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