Tekken 6

I thought i'd try and make a small review for people who might be interested in this game. If you are a Tekken fan, then you will more than likely find ways to like this game. I haven't played around with any of the new characters yet, but a couple seem to be used by quite a few people online. I'm not very good at this so to just try and break it down

Scenario campaign seems to be the center of the game almost, it's where all the story plot is driven and where you unlock items, get most achievements (if anyone cares) and earn most money. I believe you can play this co-op? But i have not done so, yet. The game type i think, shouldn't be taken seriously. The game play is okay, but could have been alot better. It feels it hasn't really improved much from The devil within from Tekken 5. You can lock on to enemies which can sometimes be useful. But anyway, i wouldn't get too excited about this and i'm still yet to complete it.

The D-pad on the 360 controller for me, is hard to use. Doing diagonal moves/attacks seems hard to pull off and in general dosen't seem that responsive. You can get your way around it and get use to it, but it aquires more concentration, aha. So i guess what i'm saying, if you care or want a decent controller/d-pad, you might want to buy some mad catz one or something, if you don't have one already.

Arcade is fine, good old usual Tekken. You get to face nancy, some huge hardcore robot machine which is in a bonus round, it's good fun to try the challenge. Then which most people seem to dislike, including myself is the Final stage, where you face off against some god like egyptian thing that takes up nearly half the screen named Azazel. This thing took me over 15 continues to take out first time round. Maybe i'm bad or it is just generally hard. It's not the difficulty that i am exactly bothered by But the character/design itself. What were they thinking? It's just over the top and spoils it for me. However, no one should really say the game is bad because of this one thing. So i'll stop the bitching.

I'll just finish off with online. This has been the most fun i've had on Xbox live in a while. I don't know if this game will remain popular enough to find a game easily in the next couple of months with other game releases coming out. But i haven't really had many troubles joining a game. One thing people may get annoyed by is sometimes the connection, as it basiclly goes slow motion Tekken and the framerate just seems to drop. I guess it's that you have your good matches and your bad matches. When all is well, it can become a very fun competitive game. I guess all i can suggest is to of course, learn some decent moves with your favourite characters and enjoy ;D

Hope this helped give someone a basic idea.

I don't normally write reviews, but having seen those unfounded 1 and 2-star ones I felt compelled to do so. I've been playing this game since it was released and in my opinion it delivers what you would expect from another tekken instalment and at the same time feels fresh and innovative.

I elaborate on each aspect of the game below:

Scenario campaign:
Many people have been criticising this mode. But why??
The scenario campaign is a lot of fun, as you can engage in a typical street fight playing as your favourite character. You can also play co-op with people online.
The storyline in scenario campaign is interesting and actually makes sense (rarity in fighting games). The cinematics could actually stand on their own as a movie. Apart from this each character has their own ending movie as usual.

Physics
The animations and movement feels very smooth and enjoyable. New to tekken 6 is a bounce system - which basically means you can perform certain moves to slam your opponent in the ground and make them bounce back allowing you to extend your combos.

Graphics
In my opinion the graphics are good. There's probably some room for improvement but they're not bad as some people say.

Character customization
Being able to customize your character adds lots of fun. The list of items for each character is quite extensive, and you can also change their hairstyle and hair colour.

New features
Recording and playing matches.
This is something worth mentioning - you can record and store your online and offline matches to watch them later. You can also upload them so that others can see them as well as download other players' replays - useful if you want to learn new tactics.

Online play
In online mode you can play player matches, ranked matches and scenario campaign. Previous connection issues have now been fixed with a new patch release. Before you start a match there's an indicator that shows you the connection quality (from 1 to 5) - so you can decide whether you want to proceed with a particular connection or you can cancel and look for another player with a better connection. Sometimes however there're still some connection issues, namely sometimes I just loose connection with the player - this happens most often when playing scenario campaign.

Conlusion
For people who are considering this game I'd say: don't get mislead by those bad reviews, check it out and judge for yourself. My experience with tekken 6 is totally different to what they described.

Pros: Great graphics and gameplay (a noticable improvement over the older generation games at least), plenty of customisation and loads of varied characters, highly addictive!

Cons: Loading times are frequent (but not as irritating as some internet reviews have made it seem, I agree with one of the other reviewers on amazon that it is no worse than other 360 games especially e.g. oblivion) and the text is very difficult to read on a small portable TV (won't be a problem for most gamers though)

Overall a really strong fighter with great gameplay, although the "Scenario Campaign" mode is weaker than the traditional modes!

In response to a previous review, I had no problem in receiving the PAL version of the game either so don't let that put you off!