Tekken 6 considering the core is as good as a fighting game can get now our days, however core gameplay isn't everything
Considering the many previous installements of Tekken being out for over a decade to not far from two, there is a good chance you have already played one of the games. Its still essentially a 3D fighter with left punch and kick, and right punch and kick. Pretty simple. The game becomes more intriguing, appealing and very competitive once you learn the various moves, throws, combination, juggles, stances, properties of each move such as range, hit and block frames, crushes, bounds, launchers, oki, pokes, etc. This is what makes Tekken the best fighter out there in terms of core gameplay. The developers also took the time to make sure the game is as balance as possible; meaning there is a chance to win with every character at high level of play. New to the fighting system is the bound and rage feature. Bound adding a twist to juggles, and rage adding a comeback mechanism. New moves, and new ways of doing combos are all there.
What makes this game not achieve a score higher then 8.5 is the horrible launch of it. The game came out with a horrendous online experience, but thankfully the patch fixed it and the online experience seems to be running quite smoothly. Still, practice is lacking and has actually gotten worst. There isn't any feature to record during practice mode which was in all previous Tekkens since Tekken 3. Tekken 5 allowed both players to use customization for their characters in vs mode; why has this been removed?
Furthermore, Tekken 6 stages are in the minority considering the huge cast, and many find them to be not as exciting as it's previous installments. Also, why are there two stages being only selectable through random select. Just seems silly in this time of videogame age. In scenario mode, there are different stages in which you can fight like in a typical 1 on 1 arcade style match, such as stage 3 for Jin's Arena Story. Why hasn't these stages been added to the actual stage roster?
Talking about Scenario Mode, it is an ok mode, but felt as if too much time had been put into this mode when they could have polish the game better. A mini game like Tekken Ball would have been just fine, with a revamp practice mode.
A patch is on its way supposedly around Christmas. Maybe, they will fix all these problems, unfortunately these problems should have been dealt with from the beginning. What could have been a game passing over the 9.0 barrier, failed due to what feels like attention to what were actually in the previous installments, or what should have been available.
To conclude, Tekken isn't meant to be played in Scenario Mode, but through vs. The nailed the most important feature of the game, which is the balance and core gameplay. Any fan of the genre would instantly love the game, and not care much about its all lack lusting problems.