Tekken 4 review

The premise is the same - take your selected character through a series of progressively harder bouts in their own particular 'story' - win all the battles and you'll get a nice ending movie and might even unlock a new scrapper. The basic moves are the same - left and right kicks and punches mapped to the Dual Shock 2's main face buttons, and the arenas, whilst still in 3 dimensions are now much bigger and feature many more environmental structures that you can actually hit each other against.Graphically it's a similar story of evolution - the characters look extremely well modelled, and except for a few clipping issues the game looks almost as good as Dead or Alive 3 on Xbox, especially when you use the built-in smoothing option in the graphics menu, which removes the aliasing (but lowers the sharpness) to create a much more believable, solid-looking display.The new mini-game, Tekken Force is a 3D Double Dragon style affair where you battle against multiple enemies at once in several themed levels. It's not all that fun, to be honest, but does provide a mild distraction on higher difficulty levels. Elsewhere, Survival, Timetrial and 2 player moves are present and correct.It's solid, slick, well presented and without doubt a better game than Tekken Tag Tournament. For most it plays better than Virtua Fighter 4, and certainly looks better, and with that in mind it deserves a higher score - despite not really moving the genre forward at all, Tekken 4 certainly does the job of providing PS2 owners with a quality beat-em-up.