Street Fighter X Tekken Review

The prospect of pitting The World Warrior against the King of the Iron Fist had us all salivating with delight, with what could be argued as the greatest crossover title in the history of fighting games; Street Fighter x Tekken has finally hit our screens.
The quick premise of this is that both Capcom and Namco Bandai will be making their own interpretations of this planned crossover title, Capcom's was the first to be created due to Namco having other projects to complete before starting on Tekken x Street Fighter. Both games will be created in their own style, so as you can imagine, the offering from Capcom is similar to Street Fighter IV while the other will be familiar to fans of the Tekken series.

This is not simply Tekken characters shoe-horned into SFIV, this is a completely different beast altogether. To begin, the game has been built from the ground up; while visually looking similar to the latest Street Fighter title, it has a number of mechanics that have been created specifically for this game. From the Pandora ability to the Gem System, you'll find a lot of content hiding under the hood of this title.

The main fear of many players looking forward to this game is that of how would the characters from Tekken translate from the comfort of a 3D based arena to the 2D plane which Street Fighter is synonymous for. The answer to this? Really well actually. Most of the combo's that Tekken players would be familiar with are still present in the game, while also utilising the traditional "quarter circle" movements to perform some of the special moves.

All the fighting is on a tag team basis, so you select you dream tag team from the wide selection of characters, then do battle against your opponents 1v1 with the ability to tag between each character, or if you're feeling daring; use all your super meter for a short burst of both characters being on the stage at the same time, however you may only control one of these. Multiplayer wise, you can potentially have four players on this game, with all characters on screen at the same time duking it out in scramble mode which is sheer mayhem.

While you do have two characters, it only takes one of them to lose all their life to lose the round so keep an eye on those magical bars. It must be noted at this point, only the PlayStation 3 version can run with 4 players at the same time online, due to limitations with Xbox Live, this functionality is is not present in the 360 version, nor is it likely to be patched in.

Multiplayer modes include the usual ranked match, practice match and endless lobby modes, along with a comprehensive replay channel that allows you to watch online matches in order for you to learn new things or even just cure your curiosity as to what tag team combinations people use. It's nice to just sit back and watch what others do without the pressure of having to fight against them.

The gem system is a strange one to figure out, in the game and available through the store are ability changing gems, these require certain criteria to be met before the gem activates, for example successfully blocking some attacks in order to activate a red gem which increases your damage output. There are literally hundreds of these things in game and range from automatic throw blocking, speed increases, armor increases, damage increases; all fully customisable in your character screen where you may select two different gem layouts.

Now the Pandora move will essentially sacrifice your teammate in order to increase your damage and speed, but have a limited timer. Think of this as your last rights move, when things are looking bad then pop it and try to turn the tables of the match. However if your timer runs out then you will die and lose the round. If you feel all of this is a tad overwhelming then fear not, Dan Hibiki is at hand to take you through a nice tutorial, explaining all of the new mechanics to you, allowing you to get to grips with them in the comfort of a training stage.

Visually, everything looks great, the stages are varied and full of action with a personal favourite being the ice canyon stage where you fight in the cargo bay of a large hovercraft, being chased by another hovercraft and a massive woolly mammoth. You'll also notice cameo appearances in some of the stages by characters from either franchise, sadly they have not made the initial roster, but could possibly be DLC additions later on. The selectable fighters look really good especially the Tekken crew that have been brought into the style of Street Fighter characters, they certainly have done them justice in the cross over.

On the sound side of things, there are a few problems, specifically during online play. We experienced sounds cutting out completely, audible stuttering and sound lag during our online matches. Our problems did not end there either, there is a degree of input lag during online matches, though we weren't able to tell if this is just limited to pads or extends to arcade sticks too; or that our execution on moves simply sucked at times. There also seems to be no obvious way to disable the gem system completely so it's really anyone's guess as to how this would extend to competitive play aside from someone physically going through each character and removing gems from their presets.

Finally at the time of writing this, there are four confirmed infinite combo's with certain characters and I'm sure you don't need us telling you how bloody awful this is, especially if you're on the receiving end of this. Currently the offenders are Kazuya and Xiaoyu on both systems while lucky PS3 players can also suffer from Kuro and Pac-Man combos.

While Street Fighter x Tekken is a very capable fighter, we feel that it requires a couple of good patches before this becomes the go to fighting game for every fan of the genre.