Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection review (PlayStation 3)

I remember the day that Tekken 5 first came out for the PS2. My flatmate, a Tekken enthusiast (to put it lightly) was up at 5am, cycled to our local 24 hour Tesco and basically camped out there until they put out the new releases. By the time I awoke and staggered downstairs he had unlocked most of the characters, mastered a couple of new ones and outfitted the majority with new… outfits.

He loved the game, and it swiftly became a house event to come home after a hard days slog to battle each other in the series that has been selling the PlayStation brand right from its inception. Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection is a kind of extension to the original Tekken 5 and seems a very accurate port of the arcade machine. This version, previously released on the PSP has been touched up with High Definition graphics (I should hope so on the PS3) although this seems to mean that only the 2D graphics are of substantially greater quality, as the 3D stuff has merely been upped in resolution with the texture and model detail remaining at the same level as the PS2 version as far as I am concerned.

Standards

The fighting game hasn’t changed very radically in the last 15 years, and in Tekken 5 DR remains pretty similar to the others in the genre. Arcade mode gives the character you a string of enemies to beat (up) culminating in a couple of boss battles and the end credits. Unlike the previous games in the series, perhaps because it is downloadable rather than on standard media, all of the endings that you will have seen from Tekken 5 are not included. The gameplay is all there (and tweaked slightly, noticeable mainly by the Tekken expert) but you won’t be unlocking movies for the gallery, which defeats some of the purpose of mastering every character. In its place, and taken straight from the PS2 version is the ability to purchase clothes and extras for each character with money earned from fighting. This version has twice the amount of items as the aforementioned PlayStation 2 iteration.

While the Arcade mode does give you cash for each enemy, you will get more from playing Ghost mode, which pits you against a never-ending string of opponents of different difficulty, much like you might encounter in an arcade, as challenger after challenger attempts to beat you. There is the classic VS mode which always remains the most fun aspect of a fighting game, as your mates can grab a second controller and show you why you need to practise more on your own.

Cast list

There are a ridiculous amount of characters to choose from, most having widely varied fighting styles and moves. The new characters, Sergei Dragunov, Lili and the return of Armo(u)r King mean that from the outset, 34 characters can be chosen, and once you have defeated the story mode once, you can finally take the reigns of Jinpachi, the boss of the game.

Each character has the classic Tekken combination of throws, punches, kicks and spinny flying kicks that never fail to impress, and since the game is simply about fighting, the characters are balanced beautifully to provide easy to pick up, hard to master gameplay that feels far in advance of the current £6.99 price tag. Ultimately, buying this game gives you an incredibly refined, superlative beat em up that while missing many of the home console game modes, contains the important bits of any fighting game. And for this price, you’d be hard pushed to find anything else on the market that can compare.