Laggy online and a rough Scenario mode keep Tekken 6 from being the must have fighter it should have been.

Tekken 6 has finally made its way over to consoles after what seems like months and months of screenshots and videos being ushered out of the house of Namco in preparation for this release. However, it's unfortunate that the hype had to be quelled so quickly with some disappointing netcode issues and a pretty lame duck attempt at an action game spin-off for the Scenario Mode. The Arcade stuff is great; the fighting is classic Tekken, with a nice, big roster that's unlocked from the start. If you're playing the game offline with a group of friends, and that's all you care about checking out, then there's no reason to not get the game as it stands. If you're only planning to go online, or if you're trying to get a little more meat out of the story and characters though? Well, be ready for some big disappointments.

When you boot up the game you've got a series of options for different modes, most of which are located under the offline option. Offline gives you Arcade, which is a classic tiered set-up, 2P local play, Survival, Ghost, and Time Attack. Most of these are pretty self explanatory to anyone that's played a fighting game before. Ghost sets you up against player archetypes over an infinite number of matches, allowing you to rank up in a similar style to the mode in Virtua Fighter 5 that had you playing against ghost data from real world players. Survival is a battle against so many opponents without recharging health, and timed is well, timed. Ghost is pretty fun, and the difficulty does hit some high points when you start to go up against 1st Dan opponents, but for the most part the AI isn't spectacular here and falls to some cheesy moves more often than not. Same goes for the Arcade mode, with one of the more frustrating boss fights from newcomer Azazel, which is this big Egyptian style god thing that takes up a lot of screen real-estate.

Scenario Mode is the story mode for Tekken 6, but instead of being a series of matches with cutscenes that pop up between the fights, it's actually mapped to a pseudo action game in the Tekken universe, following around two characters that most aren't going to give a damn about to begin with. You can select other characters for you main, but the storyline doesn't change up any regardless of who you choose, which is certainly a disappointment. The only good thing to come out of the Scenario Mode is the Arena that unlocks after a few stages. By choosing the Arena you can take a selected character through about four fights in a standard Arcade set-up, and you'll get a specific storyline beginning and ending for that character. I was glad to see this included at least, but disappointed that it was tucked into Scenario Mode instead of just being a stand-alone option from the main screen. Mostly because Scenario mode is a real chore to get through, and if you're aiming to finish it, be prepared to strap in for a much longer experience than you might suspect. Basically you have a big world map with stages spread across it, with little question marks attached because you don't know who the boss is for that stage (Protip: it's a Tekken character!), so once you select that icon you'll be transported to the stage in question. You're constantly teamed up with the secondary character, controlled by the AI. The stages are basically corridors, set against forest areas, docks, training grounds, and other drab locations. As you move forward (free run 3D, not set up like a standard fight), enemies will pop out to attack you, usually in groups of three or more. The controls are awkward for fighting, as your movement will slow down to what equates to a fight stance from the Arcade mode, and your moveset is similar to Arcade as well. It doesn't translate well to having full movement combined with that set-up though, so it's difficult to reliably pull off anything more than standard kick/punch combos without a fair amount of practice. The mode is so boring to play though, that practice would be a chore in and of itself, and not something I would look forward to.

The biggest draw for Scenario Mode is for earning items and cash to buy equipment to customize fighters. If that's not a big deal for you, then you can completely ignore it and not miss out on anything, or at least play enough of it to get the Arena unlocked and check out some movies or something. That's primarily the reason that I'm not giving the game a worse grade than I already am, but obviously if that customization stuff is a big deal, then yeah, it's awful. You can earn cash from player fights online, but not nearly as much as you do from Scenario Mode, and most items are ridiculously expensive to purchase, so online fighting isn't really a good option to earn anything.

Finally, on my list of negatives we have the online mode. The biggest draw to the game for me, and I was really hoping that Namco would get this one right, but it's a bit of a mess currently. Out of out about 50 matches played online, I'd say a 1/5th of those were decent connections, with little to no lag and good, basic fights. The rest were like watching the game being played in slow motion, with my inputs being registered on screen seconds later, and making it nearly impossible to pull of actual juggles or other combo's in a reliable manner. I'm not the best at fighting games in general, but I can at least tell when my screw-ups are attributed to my lack of ability or to bad net code. I'm relatively positive that Namco will take the current complaints about the online mode to heart, but when that'll happen and how well it will be fixed is a pretty big unknown during the time I'm typing this review up. As it stands, it's not worth picking up for online play, but obviously that can be fixed in the future.

Overall, it depends on what you're looking for from Tekken 6 as a game, as to whether or not it'd be worth your time and money to pick up at the moment. Like I mentioned before, the Arcade mode and local 2P action is great, just what I expected from the game, and while the visuals could do with a little sprucing up in comparison to the arcade stuff I've seen, it's not that awful. Not quite as stylized as recent console fighters, but not bad enough that it put me off of having fun with the game. However, if you're going in for story/scenario mode and online play, neither is worth picking the game up for at the moment. Granted, you're stuck with Scenario mode as it is currently, but online can be improved at least. Until it is, though, I'd hold off on paying full price for this one.