Recent reviews by Sharethepain

Tekken used to be fun.

Now it's devolved into this sad shell which is merely a mirror of corporate greed, the former spirit and vision of the game is now completely gone.

They've added ingame shop for a fighting game months after release as well as a battle pass. Battle pass in a fighting game. It's full of skins for your avatar, which are completely useless, who even goes into the online avatar lobby? I've never been there. I played fighting games for their flow, difficulty and fun of them, not for customizing my online avatar and showing off.

The story is completely pointless. Previous iterations of the game except for T7 used to have an okay and at least slightly interesting story. The character endings in T8 also feel completely void of heart, like they just animated something for the sake of each character having a short video.

The customization is super lack-luster, they have stripped roughly 50-75% of previous game's outfits and items, likely to add them into the item shop later.

They're also severely cracking down on modders - why? It's what made the game fun, having custom titles and more visuals, or adjusting the stages to your liking - the lighting on some of them can get annoying as you can barely see the characters if their outfit has a matching color.

As previously, the game is riddled with pluggers and bad connections, for whatever reason they are not banned though? I am forced to play against people with 2-4% disconnection rates because nobody has lower rates than that. I've even seen 14% disconnection rate trying to match me several times, why are these people not banned?

There are also people who have 4-5 bars of connection and the game plays at super slow motion with them, you literally can't even input a string of three buttons because you'd have to delay each button by a second, give or take.

But the worst offense is the way the actual fighting has turned out to be - I personally thought a little more agression would be okay, however the game plays completely different now. It's no longer about how do I open this guy up, or how do I fish for a counter hit. It's how do I make this guy stop pressing buttons, when do I press at all? It feels like almost every move leaves people on plus frames. Plus they added the dumb heat smash moves, where each character has several variations, all of them of course leaving you crushed, so if you hated rage arts, now there are two of them essentially.

And lastly the biggest gripe I have with this game - execution used to feel rewarding. Now that the game is more accessible, it's extremely dumbed down. You had to work for combos that dealt more than 75 damage, you had to practice for hours, learn the optimal combos and everything. Now every character can do 90 or more in an OPEN SPACE with no walls just with their heat. This has also killed some uniqueness of characters - remember how Lars or Dragunov could do wall to wall on really long stages? Now almost every character can do that. Now every character can pull off at least 130 damage combos without rage art, just with the silly wall quirks and bounds.

And of course, everything is obviously very unbalanced. King can literally take a third of your health with a single grab that you cannot tech - because counter-grabs are a thing now. Nina can shoot at you? Victor also shoots at you. Devil Jin has projectile chains that lead into serious damage combos. Every other character has some stupid power up that glows below their health bar. Kazuya and Devil Jin have a plethora of laser ranged attacks that are viable. Victor's and Yoshi's sword hits do like 25% of your full health bar damage on natural hit, and they also deal insane chip damage - and yoshi also heals on hit with that, because why not.

I thought we'd leave all this 2D bs behind in T7, but it's only gotten worse.

I miss Tekken, this isn't Tekken. It's a glorified mash-fest made accessible to as many people as possible pumped full of micro-transactions to appease the newer generations.

For clarification, I was a Tekken Emperor in T7 and got to blue ranks under 25 hours of playtime in T8, so I'd like to imagine my points are a little valid.

If you plan to just casually play and finish the game then go right ahead, it’s a real decent game, but it’s overhyped.

It’s a basic metroidvania roguelike game that’s all about combat, but it’s contradicting itself so much, and the higher difficulties are nigh unplayable, yet that’s where the most content and challenge is.

As any roguelike you spend your "cells" to buy stuff each run before you die, but the problem is, you are forced to upgrade and buy things that you don’t want or need in order to progress in the shop tree, which means they´ll occupy your random spawn pool of items in each run, therefore it basically punishes you for unlocking more items because you are less likely to see them in your runs, yet you have to do it if you want to unlock more, so the more things you buy, the smaller chance of ever seeing them.

There’s also forge which allows you to permamently upgrade the RNG attributes of given RNG items you find, but the problem here is that not only is it super tedious to do, requiring a lot and lot of re-runs, but in the end you only have a % chance of seeing the upgraded version, again with the annoying RNG factor. It used to be that you could upgrade every item separately and then find your upgraded version in the game, they really ruined it when they introduced the RNG to the upgraded items instead.

On the basic difficulty the combat is a breeze, you can have fun, heal between levels, there are almost no annoying enemy types in the game, it gives you time to react to situations and fights, and is all around fun I suppose.

The problems start with cell runs that you unlock after defeating the final boss, its basically game progress. Each cell is a difficulty modifier and to unlock a higher one you need to finish the previous one.

You start to encounter new enemy types, and sometimes enemies that you would not see till late game are spawning in the first areas. It might sound okay, but their damage is broken, and you can’t refill your health flask on cell runs mostly, so you are stuck for 40 minute runs roughly with 4 heals that heal about 60 % of your health, where each enemy deals about 50%-75% of your health pool on hit, sounds fun right? Especially when you start encountering stealth enemies, stunlocking enemies and mages in every single map, you have this big cluster of enemies and flying projectiles and teleporting mobs all around and each hit you take is basically end of your run unless you are really lucky to find some healing on the way, should you survive at all.

The only saving grace would be to have a good build, but guess what, it’s absolutely not up to you, you better pray to RNG Jesus that he sends you some weapons that synchronize together or you might as well restart your run. I had to restart so many games just because I got useless weapons at the start, sure I could press on, but why when I could clear it in half the time with actually decent weapons and items? That’s where the tedious cycle of farming cells for upgraded weapons begins, but even then it’s only a chance to see them. I had so many games where I dodged and punished so many enemies, played nigh flawlessly but couldn’t progress because I did not find a weapon with good enough damage.

And lastly I do not know what they did to the bosses, but they take literally no damage now, on 3 cell run I spent about 7 minutes fighting the first boss with weapons that were all in sync and buffed each others damage by 100 % if not more, while a year ago it took about two minutes if not less, and mind you thats the first boss. I feel like the high difficulties are just not playable unless you spend hours upon hours until you get really good weapon drops, and even then all it takes is one hit from some enemy to stunlock you and it’s all over.

TL:DR - Get it if you want to play the basic difficulty or want to play it for the lore. If you like getting challenged don’t bother with this, the enemies are broken and the rest is all grind and RNG on higher cell runs.