Tekken Hybrid

I like a bit of Tekken, me. It’s the one fighting game where you can actually button bash yourself into some decent combos and pretend you’re actually good at it. Tekken Hybrid is a combination of a HD remake of Tekken Tag Tournament (originally on Playstation 2), a prologue/sneak peek of Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and a DVD called Tekken: Blood Vengence, which kind of sets the story for the aforementioned sequel.

I say kind of, because really, the Tekken world is a messy one. There’s been an underlying story throughout the series, and although you don’t need to know it to enjoy Blood Vengence it helps for all of the references to the past and cameos throughout. Although the story isn’t one of its strong points ( it gets rather slow paced in places), it’s not a bad film. There are some excellent fights, most of them girl on girl (something for the men?), and it is a far better effort than the previous Hollywood attempt. I’ll ask again, though, where the hell is King? They always leave him out.

Tekken Tag Tournament was a great game the first time around. It was a fresh take on the fighting genre, with Arcade mode letting you choose two characters to take into battle. You could swap between them throughout the battle and even pull off combos using the two, attacking and ‘tagging’ at the same time. Playing the revamped version bought back memories of spending hours on this with my family, playing until one of us got moody because someone was ‘doing the same moves over again!’ When I go back to a game I haven’t played for years, I usually notice errors that I hadn’t noticed before, whether that is graphical or clunky controls. Of course, Tekken Tag has had a HD remake, and it was only last gen in the first place, so it still looks good. I was suprised, though, that the controls still felt fluid, and after spending a bit of time in Practice Mode, I had most of the moves by a couple of characters perfected, as they aren’t overcomplicated.

The real unlikely star of the game, though, is Tekken Bowl. This is a minigame, available from the offset (no unlocking required, for some reason), where again, you must choose two characters to enter… yes, you guessed it, a bowling tournament. Before I go on, though, I must say, enjoyment of this increases tenfold when you’re playing with somebody else. Each character has a different amount of strength, for example, Gun Jack is so strong he could probably throw the ball through the wall, but that means that the meter that goes up and down, that you have to press for accuracy, will also be very fast, so it is harder to hit.

One for the competitive spirits is Survival Mode, where you fight round after round, gaining only a little health between rounds, until you die. The difficulty is a steady rise, and you can put your name on the leaderboards at the end.

In the prologue for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, you get four characters to choose from: Xiyaou, Alisa, Devil Jin and Devil Kazuya. Playing in a mini tournament of sorts, you won’t see any more characters, but it does show off a few different locations for you to fight in, and they look very good. The ‘tagging’ is slicker, the moves have been tightened up and the backgrounds are great. I have a few niggling problems with it. One was present in Tekken 6. There’s a voice which booms ‘Get ready for the next battle!’ before every single battle. This becomes annoying very quickly. Also, while the graphics look great on the backgrounds, the actual character models look a little jagged. It’s early days, though, so hopefully this will be sorted out by the release. A seemingly pointless feature in the prologue is a gallery mode, where you can look at the characters and change their clothes, and that’s it. I could understand if a character bio had been included, but all you can do is change the camera, and make them do a few moves.