2015's Dirt Rally was a game designed for off-road enthusiasts. With its steep learning curve, uncompromising difficulty, and an adherence to nerve-wracking authenticity, it was an altogether different beast than the Dirt series' more histrionic entries. Rather than go back to the mainstream, American flavoured well with Dirt 4, Codemasters' latest feels like a natural continuation of Dirt Rally's grounded, white-knuckle philosophies; but with one key difference: there's been a concerted effort this time around to appeal to both veterans and newcomers alike, bridging the gap between the impenetrable and the accessible.
This begins at the game's outset, as you're presented with two distinct driving models to choose from: Gamer and Simulation. This isn't just a simple rearranging of assists and difficulty options, but two disparate ways of heaving your chosen vehicle from one corner to another. Gamer makes things considerably softer, minimising your car's stopping distance, and making it much harder to spin out of control--even with imprudent use of the handbrake. The effect of certain weather types and surfaces is also less pronounced, and it's generally a more forgiving ride, with a host of variables--including AI difficulty and myriad assists--allowing you to further tailor its challenge to your liking. Combine this with the deluge of playable tutorials in the Dirt Academy--that teach you everything from how to transfer weight, execute pendulum turns, and handle the differences between front, rear, and four-wheel drive cars--and Dirt 4 is a much more intuitive game to get to grips with than its immediate predecessor.
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Even in Gamer's relatively muted state, barrelling through each stage and gliding around hairpin turns under the tutelage of your co-driver is immensely enjoyable. Yet, upon stepping down a level from the robust sim, there's this nagging feeling that you're playing with the stabilisers on. Once you're confident enough to move up to Simulation mode, there's a palpable sense that you're unlocking a car's full potential. It's here--similarly to Dirt Rally--where Dirt 4 really shines.
In Simulation mode Dirt 4 transforms into a game focused on efficiency and adaptability. You have to be patient and precise, knowing when to push the car to its limits and when to take it steady, tussling with an antagonistic wheel just to keep the car on the track; where one slight miscalculation is likely to end in gut-wrenching disaster. There's a sense of dread that creeps in during moments like this, when you're about to eclipse the top of a hill and have no idea what's waiting for you on the other side. But take the risk and you might receive a reward in return, like the unmistakable elation that arises when you emerge through a stage unscathed. It's this heart-quickening thrill--of knowing you're on the precipice of failure at all times--mixed with the proficiency of its mechanics, that makes Dirt 4 such an engaging rally game to play.
There's a plethora of cars available, too, and a singular pleasure to be found in learning each one's intricacies. You'll strap into the majority of these unfettered beasts throughout Dirt 4's globetrotting career mode, which has you driving for sponsors until you have enough money to purchase your own vehicles and design your own racing team. It's a familiar progression loop, gradually increasing in difficulty as you gain access to faster cars and trickier tracks. There's even a touch of team management involved as you hire mechanics to fix your car in between stages, and purchase facility upgrades to, say, hasten that repair time, or expand your garage to fit more vehicles. The bulk of your time, however, will be spent out on the track. Whether that's in rally, Landrush, or Motorcross events is up to you.
Landrush encases you inside heaving trucks, buggies, and Crosskarts, and matches you head-to-head against other drivers on sandy courses crammed full of jumps and tight corners. It's a palate cleanser that removes nippy rally vehicles from the equation, but with overlong races, a lack of variety in course design, and only a handful of tracks, it eventually grows dull and repetitive.
Dirt 4 maintains the robust depth of Dirt Rally's full-blooded simulation, while smartly opening things up to a wider audience with a heaping of difficulty options
Rallycross fares better, pitting up to eight rally cars against one another on officially licensed FIA World Rallycross tracks. With dust clouds to avoid, risks worth weighing up, and the inevitable collision of chassis on chassis, these energetic races offer a modicum of depth and a change of pace from the demanding rally stages. If you don't fancy either of these racing disciplines, however, the career mode is structured in such a way that you can easily ignore them and focus purely on rally, or mix and match the three together. The choice is yours. There's certainly intermittent fun to be had between the two disciplines (leaning heavily in one direction), but, really, they're both side courses to rally's main dish.
This is perhaps most keenly reflected by Your Stage, an ingenious tool that procedurally generates rally stages at the press of a button. All you have to do is adjust two sliders to your liking--one for course length, and another for complexity--and the game will generate a stage using one of its locations as a canvas. From there you can tinker with the time of day and various weather options, and if you like the stage you can share it with friends.
With procedurally generated tracks, there was a concern that the seams between each track's assorted parts would be noticeable, but they're surprisingly nuanced and coherently put together. Familiarity has remained absent after hours and hours of play, and it shouldn't really be surprising with a near-infinite amount of potential stages. Yet, despite the impressive tech that conjures these stages from nothing, what ties them all together are the little details. The drones that whizz overhead, barely clipping the roof of your car; and the helicopters that swoop down too low and whip up a perilous dust storm. There's the ecstatic crowd spread out across the stage, and the marshals that wave you down when a vehicle has crashed up ahead. Even a farmhouse at the side of the road, buried amidst the red and brown leaves of a Michigan forest, help bring these stages to life with an authentic believability.
Your Stage's most noteworthy achievement, however, is the way it recontextualizes the lifespan of this series going forward. In other rally games, once you've played a stage enough times it veers away from rally territory and becomes little more than a time trial exercise. Suddenly you're not reacting to your co-driver's instructions, but to your own memories. You start figuring out how to save time on familiar corners and hazardous jumps, and that just isn't what rally is about. Your Stage ensures that you're never comfortable. The threat of the unknown remains a persistent threat, and you're forced to rely on nothing but your wits and your co-driver's imperative pacenotes. With--in theory--infinite stages, Dirt 4 maintains its commitment to the unadulterated thrill of rally, and that's a tremendous accomplishment.
With daily, weekly, and monthly community challenges also on the agenda, plus competitive online races in each of its three racing disciplines, Dirt 4 is certainly packed full of content. It might not have the same pomp and circumstance of previous numbered entries in the series, but Dirt 4 maintains the robust depth of Dirt Rally's full-blooded simulation, while smartly opening things up to a wider audience with a heaping of difficulty options. If Dirt Rally's punishing difficulty alienated longtime series fans in any way, this commitment to accessibility should help to bring them back, and the near-infinite possibilities of Your Stage should keep them playing. Dirt 4 is a shining example of Codemasters at their brilliant best.
The Tekken series has a long-standing reputation in arcades, but for many players it was the console ports that left a lasting impression. These versions often introduced offbeat, dramatic story campaigns, as well as more extensive additions such as delightfully odd beat-'em-up and sport modes. And in recent years, the goal of unlocking and customizing outfits for the game's large cast rounded out the most rewarding objective of all: getting good. Tekken 7 keeps most of these traditions alive and once again delivers the tight, hard-hitting action for which the series is known. The game has some server-stability issues at launch, but it's otherwise a great sequel that confidently claims its position among the best fighting games today.
Similar to other 3D Fighters like Dead or Alive and Virtua Fighter, Tekken 7 focuses on utilizing space and lateral movement during combat. By and large this is a game of inches; most fighters punch, kick, and grapple up close to one another and there's little margin for error. A moment of indecision or a sloppy move against a more skilled player can lead to a string of pummeling strikes and a hasty defeat, courtesy of the game's long combo strings. Though Tekken 7 can be punishing, its fighting system isn't as difficult to get into as it lets on. With an intuitive control scheme that assigns one button to each limb, you can learn how to attack and retaliate, step by step. The long-term trick is putting in the time to dissect and memorize your favorite character's moveset to hone your reflexes and diversify your tactics.
The biggest complaint you can lob at Tekken 7 is that it doesn't do a good job of explaining the intricacies of its mechanics, let alone how you should approach learning your character of choice. The move lists for each character often hover around 100 entries, serving as a mix of one-off special attacks and combos. Save for a few icons--which represent attack properties that the game also fails to thoroughly explain--lists are disorganized, with no categories or hierarchy to speak of. The best you can do is hop into training mode and shift from one move to the next. Thankfully, you can scroll through attack hints live, during practice, and without repeatedly entering menus.
None of this is to say that Tekken 7 is too deep, which would be a ridiculous complaint--the depth of its roster and fighting styles is to your benefit. The point is that new players will have very little help learning anything beyond the basics once they jump into battle. This is disappointing, given that other fighting games have demonstrated that the best way to retain new players is by giving them a fighting chance, and the lack of instruction is odd for Tekken, which only one game prior (Tekken Tag Tournament 2) gave players Fight Lab mode--a place to study how mechanics and different types of attacks can dictate the flow of a match.
But if this isn't your first King of Iron Fist tournament and you've kept up with Tekken over its more than 20-year tenure, you'll find that Tekken 7 delivers the same great combat you know and love with a hefty batch of new characters--and a few new mechanics. The game includes notable new supermoves that can be triggered when a character's health is dangerously low, which is also the right time to unleash a rage drive--a powered-up standard combo attack. The most important new addition is the power crush attack attribute: Relevant attacks can absorb incoming hits mid-animation, allowing you to risk a little health to increase your chances of landing a critical blow, which injects Tekken's otherwise familiar fights with a renewed element of surprise.
With more than 30 playable characters, Tekken 7 offers plenty of fighters and opponents to study. Impressively, nearly a quarter of the roster is brand new. The most conspicuous Tekken freshman must be Akuma, the red-haired bad guy of Street Fighter fame. The introduction of fireballs and hurricane kicks might seem like an odd fit for Tekken, but they don't feel overpowered in light of the fact that every character comes with their own advantages. And when it comes to facing down Akuma's projectiles specifically, they can be easily sidestepped given the game's 3D movement. Street Fighter fans will appreciate how easy it is to fight as Akuma, since many of his traditional moves and inputs are present and accounted for. Even Street Fighter's meter-based mechanics have been carried over for his Tekken debut.
Interestingly, Akuma also plays a pivotal role in the main story mode. Hailed as the final chapter in the series' long-running story of martial-arts papa Heihachi Mishima and his quarrelling family, Tekken 7's narrative will delight Tekken veterans, especially when the oft-referenced-but-never-before-seen Kazumi Mishima breaks onto the stage. The only major downfall here is the robotic and stale narrator, a reporter covering the Mishima family. His delivery is too shallow to take seriously and not witty enough to make his deadpan cadance funny. You may also notice that some fights seem arbitrarily difficult along the way, but thanks to the gift of shortcut commands for powerful attacks--a system referred to as Story Assist--they're more of a temporary annoyance than a barrier.
Beyond the two to three hours spent on the main story, every character not present therein gets their own brief chapter, limited to a short text intro, a single fight, and a unique ending cutscene. Not all are created equal, but there are gems to find that are purposefully awkward and light-hearted--the perfect complement to Tekken's pervasive melodrama. Fans of the alien samurai Yoshimitsu will, for example, appreciate how he's initially humanized and made vulnerable, only to be subsequently kneed in the groin by the object of his affection.
Tekken 7 lives up to the series' penchant for tongue-in-cheek shenanigans and generously gives you access to the series' entire back catalog of cutscenes, from the very first Tekken's low-res clips all the way to background movies made specifically for Japanese pachinko machines. There's a lot of Tekken history to unlock, and the collection is a wonderful trip down memory lane.
Using Fight Money earned by playing the game's various modes you can purchase both cutscenes and cosmetic items for characters. Tekken 7 offers a lot of basic variations of hairstyles or glasses to buy, and an equal amount of stranger outfits and accessories--including neon butterfly wings, a floating clownfish companion, and automatic rifles, to name a few. While you certainly don't need to dress fighters up in ridiculous outfits, doing so will give you a new appreciation for how comfortable Tekken 7 is in its own skin. It's a hardcore, demanding fighting game, but it's also happy to be the butt of its own jokes.
Items--so-called "treasure"--can also be unlocked rather than purchased within the Treasure Battle mode, which puts you in a series of fights with increasing rewards and challenges. There's also training mode and an arcade mode where you can practice your moves, but Treasure Battle is easily the most attractive way to spend your off-time in Tekken 7. If you're going to practice before hopping online to fight, you might as well have something to show for it.
A few days after launch, Tekken 7's online modes are experiencing a few issues across all platforms, and while these are mostly isolated to ranked matches, it's not uncommon to lose connections in casual matches, either. It's an issue that publisher Bandai Namco is aware of and plans to patch, but at the moment, it's not always easy to get into a match unless you're willing to hammer attempts for minutes on end. When you're eventually able to get into a match, pray that it's over a better-than-average connection; Tekken 7 becomes a slide show online under lesser conditions.
Notwithstanding that ranked matches are currently a crapshoot, Tekken 7 remains an easy game to recommend. Its diverse roster is packed with a wide range of personalities and fighting styles, bolstered by a raucous attitude that begs to be taken seriously while simultaneously mocking its more peculiar whims in the process. Tekken fans will find their next favorite game--one that's the product of decade's worth of refinement. And while some of this depth will be lost or out of reach for newcomers, there's enough fun to be had outside of hardcore competition to keep players from all walks of gaming thoroughly entertained.
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