Tekken: Dark Resurrection review

Would we be crazy to say that the oceanic depth of Tekken: Dark Resurrection makes it the single best portable fighting game ever? Well, we're putting it out there just like that. Search as long as you want, complain all you like, but with more than 30 playable characters, a full roster of fighting styles and the best PSP graphics to date, there's barely even room for comparison.

Dark Resurrection is, in actuality, nothing more than a port of an arcade Tekken 5 tweak. Two new fighters join the ranks (read about themhere) and some characters receive new moves, but in the end, this plays just like the many entries before it - which is good, because that translates to slamming sound effects, smashable objects in the fighting arena and some of the nuttiest brawlers you'll see in any fighter, ever. Like what, you ask? A robotic, alien samurai. A boxing kangaroo. A panda bear. We could go on and on, but don't worry - there are plenty of straight-laced scrappers at your disposal, including boxer Steve Fox, dance-fighter Eddy Gordo and the returning master of wrestling, Armor King.

If you've been turned away from the button-and-combo-memorization gameplay of earlier Tekkens, there's little here to win your heart back. And it's a true negative that the fighting is more about remembering button sequences than it is intuitively stringing moves together... but when it all looks so damn good, smooth as an arcade's wet dream, grabbing a dude by the face and burying him in the dirt is fun no matter how it happens.

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