PS 2 - Tekken Tag

Review of Tekken Tag Tournament

Well its time once again for the Tournament of the Iron Fist competition. This time every single previous Tekken combatant (minus poor little Gon) will be participating for the coveted honor of obtaining this dubious badge of recognition. Its gonna be a free for all to be sure, but at least now with the tag feature you can bring along a little help…of course the same goes for your opponents too..!

The big addition is inclusion of the tag feature. While you cannot have four simultaneous players on the screen at one time, the tag feature allows you to swap players at the press of a button (well, thumbstick actually). This added a great deal of strategy to the overall great gameplay of Tekken games. Selecting two characters that play well off each other can have you pummeling the opposition in no time and also makes the gameplay more involving. With the addition of the new PS2 multi-tap, it also allows four players to engage in a Tekken battle…something never before accomplished in the series.

The game modes for the most part should not surprise anyone. There is the Arcade mode, which is primarily the clone of the Arcade game. It is here that you will be able to unlock the majority of characters and hidden game modes. Next is the Team Battle mode which allows up to eight (times 2) character battles on each side. This is a one or two-player mode. Time Attack mode enables players to post their best times for fighters and Survival mode where you can see just how long you can survive a never ending onslaught of opponents.

Non-playable modes include Theater, which allows gamers to view all of the end movies (done in real time with the PS2 game engine) for each victorious character.

Finally, there is the hidden TTT Bowling mode that gets unlocked when you win with all of the games starting characters. This little side game is actually quite good and will most certainly not disappoint those that have become used to Namcos little extras. Players can actually participate in a full bowling game and if you get high score you unlock another character.