Are Kuma (right) and Rufus evenly matched? Bearly.If the Street Fighter series ever got in a real fight with the Tekken series, Street Fighter would knock it into last week. Street Fighter has made a name for itself as the most balanced, polished, and technical fighter around. Tekken is a juggle-heavy game with two less buttons and farting bears. So it’s really no surprise that Street Fighter X Tekken feels more like the former than the latter. (But the farting bear stays.)
Street Fighter X Tekken takes place in a two-dimensional realm, and Tekken characters look and fight like Street Fighter characters. But the game’s also added bunches of juggle-y hits and over-the-top super moves — the kind Street Fighter has never contained. The result is a full, unique experience that’s equal parts familiar and new, technical and mashy.
Happily, the game feels incredibly polished and chock full of exciting features. If you’re not much for waiting in lobbies, you can play the Arcade mode and still be challenged in online battle; once you finish, you’ll pop back into your arcade game. If you’re not quite ready for ranked matches, an entire section online is devoted to elite replays — and every replay that’s been uploaded can display button entry, hit percentage, and a wild assortment of valuable information.
Scramble (not shown here) is a brand-new mode that pits two against two at the same time. With four characters in the same space, the resulting fights are absolutely chaotic. Here, more than anywhere else, you have the chance to partake in almost complete mayhem, smashing buttons and at times completely losing track of your character.If you’re a sucker for whackadoo fighting-game stories, Street Fighter X Tekken won’t disappoint. Its plot is as vapid as other fighters’, but every single classic tag team (from Ryu and Ken to Heihachi and his trained bear, Kuma) has custom cutscenes. Oddly, by default, many voiceovers are delivered in Japanese (regardless of a fighter’s origin) — leading to a strange hodgepodge of characters speaking different languages to each other without a hitch — but the options menu lets you adjust whether each character speaks English or Japanese.
But where Street Fighter X Tekken really delivers the goods is in its gameplay. Loaded with new tactics and moves, fights in Street Fighter X Tekken feel a bit faster and more aggressive than those in some other Street Fighter games. Also, recognizing a viable strategy for your tag team is crucial: a slow powerhouse like Ogre might match well with, say, lightning-fast Cammy. But even a good strategy often dissolves into split-second decisions.
This frenzy is compounded by the fact that unlike most fighting games, once one character is KO’d, the round is over. Fortunately, if one of your characters is low on health, you have plenty of options. You can use a launcher (a new move that juggles your enemy and subs in your teammate), you can burn a bar of your super meter to attack tag-in, or you can burn all three bars for a huge tag-in combo.
Street Fighter X Tekken also introduces an all-new Pandora mode, in which you can kill off one teammate with low health to supercharge your other character for a brief amount of time. Once in Pandora mode, your health will quickly deplete, and if you haven’t killed your opponent by the time it hits zero, you’ll die. Regrettably, even computer players can easily dodge characters, so we found the move almost entirely worthless: using it almost always ended in us losing the round. Either way, if this sounds like a lot to decide in less than a second, just wait until you’re actually playing.
The better the gem, the harder it is to activate.The complexity of the game extends even after the battles, where you’ll have to decide which gems to equip. Gems are power-ups that activate when you meet certain criteria, like getting punched five times. If you can’t quite pull off your favorite characters’ special moves, you can equip a gem that will make them easier to input — but will also sacrifice 10% of your power and an all-valuable gem slot. Bigger power-ups require harder activation criteria, and it’s clear that Capcom has taken great measures to make these power-ups fair and balanced. Unfortunately, and controversially, preorder specials contain gem power-ups that can’t be found elsewhere, and they’re not insubstantial: Street Fighter X Tekken’s limited edition features 36 additional power-ups, and several retailers have 9 unique gems.
Whether these bundles provide an unfair advantage has yet to be seen, but Capcom does plan to support the game with robust DLC, which will likely alleviate some of the “advantage” of the limited-edition bundles. We’re excited to see which additional characters make the cut in future DLC, but the current 38 characters and all-new fighting system are well worth the purchase price regardless.
PUBLISHER: Capcom • DEVELOPER: Capcom • ESRB: Teen • MULTIPLAYER: 4 on same console or Xbox Live • ACHIEVEMENTS: Complex • COST: $60
+ Perfect blend of technical and fun gameplay; plenty of new moves.
+ Huge roster of diverse characters; each fighter feels both unique and familiar to series vets.
– Certain characters feel over- or underpowered; Pandora mode seems busted.
? Wait, why is Guile speaking in Japanese, again?
