Steam Deck Status Unknown!Welcome to my review of TEKKEN 8 on the PC. This game was developed and published by Bandai Namco. It is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Most gamers will probably be familiar with the name TEKKEN as it has been around since 1994 when it was an arcade game, then released in 1995 when it was ported to the PlayStation.
TEKKEN 8 continues the Iron Fist Tournament and once again fighters must contend not only to be king of the iron first but for a whole different reason. Of course, I won’t spoil the story so you will have to play it yourself to find out more.
The Game
If you’re not aware of the whole TEKKEN story then don’t worry, you don’t have to play story mode to have fun with this game. There are plenty of game modes that will keep you busy. We have (of course) the story mode, TEKKEN ball, Super Ghost Fights, Offline VS play, Online VS play, Arcade Quest, Arcade Story, and more. There are tons of different modes that will keep players of all skill levels pretty damn busy.
Speaking of skill levels, TEKKEN 8 has a cool mode where you press LB (or L1 on PlayStation) and it’ll switch the game to a simpler fighting mode for you. This is called Special Style and it puts the game into a simpler mode that will allow you to enjoy the game without having to learn sixty-two million different move combinations to be good. Of course, if you wish to learn all those moves, you have the traditional fight style.
This, for me at least, is fantastic. I’m not the best with move combinations regarding speed, so the special style makes TEKKEN 8 a delightful game for me. I know this will put me at a disadvantage when it comes to fighting online, but I can still have fun online with special style. Whilst I mentioned having fun online, the game also supports cross-play so if you own the game on say PC, you can play with friends on Xbox or PlayStation. Pretty cool!
The story is quite a generic one, the whole good versus evil to save humanity. Although this isn’t good versus evil as the story is Jin vs Kazuya with some tag-along fighters on the way. There is way more to the story than that. But, as mentioned above I don’t want to spoil it for anyone so you won’t find them here.
One notable part in the story is you get swarmed by enemy soldiers and some fighters too, this results in a TEKKEN Force (remember that?) style mission where you essentially kick the living sh*t out of everything on the screen to progress. It’s pretty fun trying to get a high combo. By the way, try and get at least a combo of 30 and thank me later.
There is a wide range of fighters to choose from, with more coming in the form of DLC soon. Unfortunately one of the classic TEKKEN fighters, Eddie Gordo, is a paid DLC character. This saddens me as he is a classic fighter. However, the game makes up for it with many different fighters in the base game.
I was most pleased when I noticed Yoshimitsu was on the base roster. This was one of my favourite fighters on the classic TEKKEN games of yesteryear.
Conclusions
To conclude my review, I would like to say that TEKKEN 8 has to be one of the best fighting games I have played in a long time. I loved the story, although the last chapter felt a bit dragged out, it was still great fun. The gameplay is brilliant and easy to pick up. The graphics are pretty damn phenomenal. Last of all, the soundtrack is absolutely class. I loved it.
The only real issue seems to be some of the online play. You know the type of people who join and then leave a match which isn’t fun at all. But I guess this isn’t the game’s fault!
I score TEKKEN 8 a 9/10.
Should you wish to learn more about the game, you can visit the official website. If you enjoyed this review, you can read our previous reviews.
A code was kindly provided for us to review this.
