TOKYO – Tekken 6 has been in Japan's arcades since November 2007, so the audience's relative lack of interest in the demo at the Tokyo Game Show last month wasn't terribly surprising.
A closer look, however, revealed something special at the corner of the Bandai Namco booth: One of the demo stations for its latest fighting game was running the new "scenario campaign" mode that is unique to the upcoming Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game. Instead of the traditional one-on-one fighting game experience, this a throwback to the beat-em-ups of years past, where you take Tekken characters onto the streets to fight various thugs.
Previous games in the Tekken series have tried this sort of gameplay, but I like this one more.
As a huge fan of genre classics like Final Fight, I'm not sure why more fighting games don't do this. I suppose it's a question of resources, as designing levels to explore and enemies to fight must be a significant task. But there's also the question of how to change the controls. Fighting games purposefully restrict movement to keep the combatants on a single plane and open up the joystick for inputting complex special move commands. A beat-em-up requires a greater range of motion to evade enemies and hazards.
This "scenario campaign" is much more impressive than the ones seen in Tekken titles past. In the level I saw, I was able to choose any character from the full roster and then run along a pier turning corners as a camera tracked my character's movements. The view was wide-open and not nearly as tight as previous games' scenario modes, and the sunny background was a definite step up from the sterile hallways of Tekken 4's Tekken Force or Tekken 5's Devil Within.
The enemies are quite weak, and can easily be juggled two or three at a time if you get them in the right spot. Defeated enemies drop score-building collectibles like eggs, baby chicks and treasure chests, while certain crates can be smashed for new weapons. The first stage of the demo contains a large Gatling gun that delivers an entirely unnecessary level of firepower given the fragility of your opponents, but there's a certain feeling of giddiness that comes from mowing them down so easily.
Ultimately, that's the campaign mode: not especially challenging (based on what was shown at TGS) but surprisingly fun. Even better is the co-op play: Going alone means dragging along a less-than-intelligent CPU partner, but playing with a friend could be quite amusing. Since this entire mode is simply an add-on for an already substantial fighting game, Tekken 6 has a lot going for it when it hits store shelves worldwideandai at the end of October.
Photo Daniel Feit/Wired.com
