Polished version of DOA 2&3, but counters and AI are fustrating!
Sadly Team Ninja actually listened to the critics that were not even fans of the series more than their fans who love their game. So now counters are extremely hard to pull off, but the cheap AI can do counters any time it wants. I don't mind if they make counters harder to do, but don't make it easier for the AI to pull of counters more than they ever did before. Team Ninja made an attempt to make the game more skill based, and in my opinion they nearly took the fun out of the game.
Another major problem is that Team Ninja was lazy and just took the 3d models from DOA Beach Volleyball and tweaked them. These are NOT next gen 3d models. So the characters only look slightly better than DOA 3 on XBOX. This makes the game look strange since the enviroments do look next gen. So you have these highly detailed environments that are beautiful, but that characters look like plastic dolls. Team Ninja's excuse is that this is their style, that is B.S.. Look at their CG movies and some of the charcters have way more realisim in them, although others like Kasumi still have life less character animations in the CG movies. Also this excuse worked for Dreamcast, PS2 and Xbox because the power wasn't there to make very realistic characters, but 360 has more than enough power to make realistic characters. An example of this is to look at what Sega is doing with Virtua Fighter 5. Those characters have taken a huge jump in realism since VF 4, but Team Ninja took no leap in realism except the costumes do look better with fur and bump mapping on the fabric, and the awsome enviroments.
In the end this is still DOA which is good, but it's not Next Gen. AI and Counters are frustrating, but fighting moves are improved over past versions. I hope DOA 5 takes a leap in the series because it's been almost the same since Dreamcast.
P.S. Nearly forgot another problem is that online the game lags like crazy, and it can get really annoying when every other battle is fought in slow mo because of the lag.