Tekken Tag Tournament 2

[CitizenErazed]

I remember the glory days of playing Tekken 3 on the PS1, and the not so glory days of playing Tekken 4 and the first tag tournament on PS2, the latter two were average at best so I lost enthusiasm to try 5 or 6 moving instead to soul calibour and Mortal Kombat, however seeing the new tag tournament in the shops brought back memories and I decided to give it another go.

I'm very glad I did! It arrived yesterday and I've been playing it non stop since. The first thing I noticed was the sense of real power, the sound vibration and graphics all combined perfectly to convey a sense of power from the characters I haven't felt with other beat 'em ups. There's also a massive list of characters to choose from, mastering them all would take all year. The game is a lot more balanced then previous installments as well, Eddie is no longer a button bash your way to glory character, yes you can button bash him but you wont get too far, the game actually rewards good fighting and learning the characters so you don't get the annoying old scenario where you spend weeks mastering Hwoarang and then some little git comes along and button bashes Eddie, beating you in no time flat. To balance things out further it now also uses a true skill system, you go up belts, from Kyu to Dans which works well for online multiplayer, the true skill means you battle people around your level, however offline it's a bit pointless to start with as until you get into the higher Dans the levels are all about the same, pretty easy. The achievements for the game are also really simple, I got 20/50 in the first couple hours of play without even trying, none of them are hard to get. Arcade mode is so easy no matter what belts you're fighting, you just seem to stroll through until the final stage which is a bit rubbish but the other modes make up for it. Speaking of other modes, it has a fight academy to teach bad players how to get better, but it really just shows the basics unfortunately, it uses combot to teach movement, blocking, simple limb movement, punishers, throw breaks and tag dynamics, the special moves for each character and combos you have to teach yourself in practice mode. It also has a customise section where you can buy and change clothing and items, a bit like soul calibour but without the abilities side of it, and you can equip random and silly things if you want. No story to the game though which is probably it's biggest let down but that's ok because it's just fantastic arcade fun! It's hard to describe just what's so great about this game but the gameplay really is a lot of fun.

Overall then it's too easy to begin with and lacks a story mode but that doesn't matter because this game is incredible fun, more fun then I've had from a game in ages and I'd highly recommend it to everyone. 8.5/10

So, I thought I'd start a thread so people could arrange matches and talk about the setups they're using. I'm a Jin player myself, I did start off teaming him up with Eddie but I've switched that to Nina now because they both like each other so they give each other +1 Netsu activation and can do combination tag throws. Item wise I've given Nina a handgun so if I'm in a stand-off position with neither one of us advancing I can just tag and shoot them. I'm currently hammering practise mode to learn Jins 10 hit combo and then move on to Ninas. If anyone fancies a fight let me know!