My opinion has shifted on Tekken 8 since it made a splash back in January. What started as a global event and a celebration of Tekken and the FGC as a whole has turned into perhaps the most tilting, dishonest fighting games ever created. I’m not writing this all pissed-off after a lackluster night on ranked. I’ve stopped playing for a few days and I feel no reason to go back.

Tekken 8 is miserable.

The first obvious issue is the heat system. It’s horrible. With a press of a button you get an attack that is fully tracking, plus on block, fast, armored, and launches if opponent is airborne. Once in heat, many characters get insanely powerful moves that do everything. Launch, plus on block, infinite range, you name it. Not only are these moves incredibly unbalanced and braindead, but they rip much on the integrity of Tekken straight out. Tekken has always been a knowledge check type of fighting game. There has always been bullshit moves that you need to lab. However, that’s not the case with these heat attacks. There’s absolutely nothing you can do. There shouldn’t be moves in fighting games with no counter play. They feel cheap to go up against and they feel dirty to use. It’s so disingenuous and braindead.

Heat is not the only problem however. Everything is just so over-tuned. Defense is a guessing game. It seams like every attack clips you if you try to sidestep, even with plus frames.
So many strings jail on block so you can’t duck and punish. Neutral is gutted by insanely powerful WR moves that are nearly homing and grant plus 7 if not more. Low parry was nerfed significantly making defense much worse. Many of the best characters in the game have heat smashes that fully track and grant plus frames, leaving you a sitting duck in neutral.

Defense has been gutted. Neutral has been gutted. Offense has been simplified with braindead moves. Pluggers are still a problem. Rank boosters quit after one lose. Feng still isn’t nerfed. Dragunov is still doing 70% on one launch. Devil Jin still has his heat smash. Xiayou still has a mid-mid-mid string that’s plus and a non-launch punishable unseeable snake edge. Counter-hit and homing throws are still a problem.

With all these factors, I find myself wondering: “is this even better than Tekken 7?” I hold out hope that with some balance patches and some key nerfs that Tekken 8 can still be the greatest Tekken. But as of now? It’s probably the worst Tekken of my lifetime.

This title has managed to hook people again like Tekken3 hooked it at the time.

The problem with this is that now they have added microtransactions, and from what it seems they want to add a Battle pass to it.

Aside from that, having AMD is a problem since one of the maps crashes on its own unless you lower the graphics until it looks like you're playing the first Tekken on a CRT monitor.

$2000 for PC and the Deluxe version of the game to have the possibility of crashing several times and ending up banned. I can't play until they fix that specific problem since they are also banning people who used mods, and the only mod I have is to lower the graphics of that specific map.

If you plan to buy some Tekken and you don't care about all this, buy Tekken 8. However, if you like modding games and don't want to support the abusive practice of microtransactions and the destruction of an entire community, don't waste your money.

Unicorn Overlord is the mirror dimension 13 Sentinels. 13 Sentinels had an engaging and compelling story and solid cast but lacked any gameplay intrigue; Unicorn Overlord has a satisfying gameplay loop, but it's paired with a bland story and horridly trite characters. The whole cast feels like ChatGPT excrement, there're so many characters and they're just mindlessly shat out at every turn. Some positives? The gameplay is great, slowly conquering the world, expanding your roster with new units to experiment with, it was all very engaging... for a while. The first 20 hours of this game are engrossing, it's quite easy to ignore the game's shortcomings during this period. Then we run into another big problem, this game is 50 hours long... once you've played 20 hours, you've seen it all. The game will still throw new unit types and level gimmicks at you, but they're not nearly enough to keep the loop satisfying in the mid to late game. Unfortunately, once the gameplay grows tired, there's absolutely nothing of value left here.

70€ single player game + denuvo + mtx + atrocious perfomance + crashes

I've waited 12 years for this. I'm tired, boss. I'm tired of people defending all this shit.

Also, if you don't see how these mtx and the performance issues are two facets of the same issues, you're hopeless. They are both born of the same greed. They cut corners in optimisation and testing, resulting in the crap performance issues, due to the same greed that makes them milk idiots for mtx.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.