Simply the worst DOA game ever, extremely lazy cash-in on behalf of Team Ninja. This is strictly for hardcore fans only.
With a heavy heart, I have to really bash this game which is difficult since I've been a pretty big fan of the DoA series since I first played the original arcade game. Whilst the 'core' of the game is pretty good and graphical wise, unfortunately the actual gameplay is disastrous, imagine the 'normal' difficultly setting to be something that of 'Very Hard' setting in DoA3 which leads to extreme frustration whilst playing vs the computer.
The cpu has vast abilities to juggle you, do crazy combos (which most of which...you can't do) and counter your attacks on a whim, I guess the difficulty setting is there to cover the fact you can complete the story modes in perhaps less than 5 minutes so they ramped up the cpu difficulty setting so your forced to re-play matches sometimes as many as 10 times before winning simply because your opponent can unleash some unblockable and uncounterable attacks and pretty much beat you or close to it without giving you little chance to defend yourself, such as infamous air juggle combos, not to mention many other nasty/dirty tricks the cpu is able to do, that the player can't.
I'm guessing the core of most reviews here that are given 'favorable' reviews are playing it online, which I haven't done as yet, but I'm clearly seeing that I think this is where the main strengths of the game are most likely found, especially if you can find similar ranked players, I quickly checked the online modes last night and found very few players actually online. I'm just going to wade though the morass of single player frustration this game provides to unlock the bonus characters then unless there is a pretty decent online community...cast this game into the abyss of poor quality beat-em-ups, this does not deserve the title of Dead or Alive, this is a travesty of a game.