It’s hard to judge a Playstation 2 game at the moment. On the one hand, you have well established Playstation titles looking better than ever, but on the other hand, these same games are pretty much identical to what you’ve already played many times before. Tekken Tag Tournament doesn’t change this. The first thing that hit me was how un-flashy it looks. I have played the awesome looking Soul Calibur far too much, so I was expecting that same quality or better. Unfortunately, first impressions are bad. The fighters at times can look very good, with Alex the Raptor being very well modeled, yet others can look terrible, with Paul Phoenix looking positively deformed. The textures and movement all look fine, albeit a little stiff and as if not motion captured. The backgrounds too, can range from very good to very poor. The problem lies with the fact that although 3D, the floor immediately around the fighters is floating independently of the surrounding environment. If the fighters move around, the floor appears (pop-up) and disappears in squares. This gives the game a very unfinished look, and stops it from being a show-offable title. The entire backgrounds do become proper 3D environments in replays and start-ups, and they look much better for it, so why didn’t Namco modify the code to allow for surrounding walls instead of just porting the arcade’s archaic program? Laziness and launch deadline seem to be the culprits. The other niggle I have with the game is that the tag feature is next to useless. You choose 2 characters, which is fine. You can switch between them whenever you wish throughout a fight, which is also fine. BUT! If one of your fighters loses all his or her energy, it’s game over. Your back-up fighter does not jump on to take over, even if they have a full energy bar! Some people say this adds more skill to the game, which is sort of true, but to me, it just means when you’re low on energy, you just keep frantically swapping between fighters in a hope of surviving. Namco, look at what Capcom are doing with games like Marvel vs Capcom 2 to see how to do ‘real’ tag fighters.

Okay, so all the Tekken fans out there will be screaming about this review so far, with everybody else quietly carrying on. The strange thing about Tekken Tag Tournament is that in spite of all it’s faults, it’s actually good fun to play. I must admit to hating the thing when I first got it, but after I’d earnt a few more characters, I was getting into it nicely. I loved Tekken 1 & 2 on the original Playstation, but never liked Tekken 3. I never found it as fun as most other fighters of the time, so put it on the shelf with the rest of the dusty Playstation games. Tekken Tag Tournament, although being a re-hash of Tekken 3, has the second game’s fun factor. For me, this is primarily down to it having the return of my favourite character, Baek. Okay, he was supposed to have died between Tekken 2 & 3, but who cares?! Almost all the other characters from every Tekken game return, completely disregarding the issues of age and death! For example, I thought Julie was Michelle’s daughter, but they look almost the same age! Never mind, it just means many people’s favourites have finally returned! Yay for the return of the evil Law-type Lee! My very own personalised fighter!

So, is the game worth getting? Yes, just. It’s not worth buying a Playstation 2 for though, and it will never ‘wow’ you like Soul Calibur did and still does. Instead, it will give you a damn playable fighter, with tons of hidden characters to earn, some great 2 players versus the computer modes, and even a 10-pin bowling game! The intro, although nicely done, is a little disappointing. It’s an FMV offering, which could be done on any console. Is this showing the limits of the machine already, by saying FMV is still better than what the console can produce? Code Veronica has proved that rendered cut-scenes can look nicer than FMV ones, so really there is no excuse with new hardware. Every character, including all hidden ones, has an end sequence, and although they are short, they are not FMV and are better for it.