Tekken Mobile - Brief Review

Tekken Mobile has been released worldwide yesterday for Android and iOS, although the game have been around for a while since last year. I downloaded it early last week and I've been playing this game for about a week now. I wasn't 100% impressed with it. As a fan of Tekken, I've played all its game from the first one until the latest Tekken 7, which I've made a brief review of it HERE.

I actually anticipated the mobile version of this game but a bit disappointed when I downloaded and played it. I will tell you why as I go on in this post.

Like many mobile version of a PC or console game, it will never be the same. Normally it will be a stripped down version or a totally different version overall. It's no different for Tekken. For me, this mobile version is a totally different version from the PC/console one. If you expect it to be the enhanced version of the old one (not Tekken 7), you're wrong.

This Tekken mobile features a swipe and press kind of play style. There are no visible button and there's only two things you have to do, swipe left/right at the left side of the screen to move back and forward, hold it for blocking and tap or hold the right side of the screen to execute basic moves combinations. That's all and nothing more. To execute special or more powerful moves you need press any cards at the bottom right screen. These card have cool down timer and varies based on each type of the card. The type of cards that will appear there will depends on your loadout od 9 cards which you can customize. To get this card you have to collect them and it's called Waza cards. You can get it from the loot packs or from packs that you can buy from the in-game store. That's pretty much about the main style or concept of its game-play. So simple and not as challenging as the main version on this game. All you have to do is to execute the attack at the right timing.

If you're familiar with game like Injustice or Mortal Kombat X, then this game have almost the same concept. I played those two and I got bored of it after a few months because as you move up in the online ranking, it will be harder since there's not much element of competitiveness in it. Those with a good reflex can win this game easily.

This game is free to play but there is an in-game store for the in-app-purchase. The price is typical from $4.99 up to $99.90 so if you're a fan of this kind of game you might be spending some real life, hard earned money for it.

So, what's good about this Tekken mobile version? Let me break it down to some points below.

I. It's Tekken, the best fighting game for a very long time and as a fan I will surely download and play it but maybe not going to play it for a long time.

II. It's free to play and there are a lot of rewards for leveling up and from the achievements in which you can get a lot of gems.

III. It's not pay-to-win kind of game. Even if you have the strongest fighter, you will be matched with those of the same level and power.

IV. Apart from the online play where you battle other player's fighters, there's also a story mode for single player.

V. For now there are three fight modes available, Story Mode, Dojo and live events. Dojo mode is where you will be attacking other user's Dojo. You will fight the fighters that they have set to defend their Dojo. You can put three of your fighters to defend your Dojo. Dojo mode will have it's season which will run for a few days. You will be ranked and your reward at the end of the season will based on that rank. There are 8 ranks in the Dojo Challenge Season so the higher rank you climbed, the better the rewards. It's not live battle, for your information. Another fight mode, Local Vs is still not available for now. As for the story mode, there are 3 Acts with 5 chapters for each Act available to play. You will unlock a new level of difficulty, which is higher, after you've completed each Act in a lower difficulty. There are 4 difficulties available, easy, normal, hard and very hard.

VI. You will get packs from all of the fight modes. In live events, you can get more specific things depending on the event itself. Apart from packs, you can also directly get a fighter by beating the event. Some even will offer things like elemental shards which you will use to level up you fighters.

VII. Fighters in this game are grouped into four elements, earth, water, lightning and fire. Each element have it's advantage against other elements and you can see this during the match up screen before the fight start. Each fighter's rarity will be rated from 1 star to the highest of 4 stars. So you will have to unlock four characters for each fighter, one character for each rarity. If you've played Tekken game before, you'll see the familiar faces in this mobile version line ups. There are two ways to unlock fighters, one is by collecting the fragments that you can get from the packs that earn or buy. Secondly is by getting it directly from any packs which will depends on your luck. I got two 2 stars fighters from premium pack I bought using the gold so far.

I guess I was a bit lucky to get two 2 star fighters from the premium packs.

VIII. From all the fights in any fight mode, you will get packs that contain various items. You will also get exp points and gold.

IX. You can start off playing this game without spending a single dollar. I'm level 12 now and I haven't purchase anything except buying the packs using gold currency that I earned in the game from all the fights. Lets see how far can I go without spending any money on this game.

The packs that you can buy with the gold that earned from all your fights. It takes a lot of fights to earn those gold.

X. You will be given one star Nina and Kazuya as well as 2 star Feng to start with and in one of the tutorial you'll Dragunov. You're good to go because using those fighers is enough to get you far in the easy difficulty story mode and Dojo mode. But I would suggest that you play story mode first before jumping into the Dojo mode because you need to collect some items like healing cube, boost item and revive potion. You will so also get some extra one star fighters as well as fighter fragments.

This is your first line up of fighter you got after you finished the tutorial.

Those are the good things I've found so far and like I said, I wasn't totally impressed of this game. There are many reasons for it and I believe some other fans of Tekken game will feel the same way. Because of how the good Tekken have been all the years that it exist, expectation for mobile version was probably high as well. So when it was released, a lot of the fans' expectation is not met.

I don't normally do this in my review but here are the flop, the flaws, the not-so-good of the game part or whatever you want to call it :D

I. It's free to play but there in-apps-purchase. This is typical for probably 90% of the mobile games nowadays because it's easier to make money from it then the PC or console games. So you might be spending money in this game especially if your patience is very thin.

II. The game style and the way of playing it is so simplified. If you've played Tekken on PC or console before, you will feel like it's a downgrade playing this mobile version. Probably bad for this game in the long run.

Tap, tap, tap, slide, slide, click the waza card

III. Tekken is proud of its 3D fighting game concept and it has been one of the highlights that the players like so much. Other fighting games mostly are 2D left to right linear concept. This mobile version doesn't comes with that 3D concept and the graphic is not so impressive.

IV. The Waza card for executing special or more powerful moves is kind of make this game less interesting because apart from the part where you cannot choose what card you can get from the packs, you also cannot choose which card will appear first while in the fight. The number of cards that will appear during the fight will depends on the star level of your fighters. Also, you can only have 9 cards in your deck and if all those 9 cards have appeared during a fight, you will not have any more to use.

The waza cards for Nina. I get a lot of her duplicate fragments so those fragments were converted to random waza cards.

V. Collecting fragments to unlock fighters. This is probably I hate the most about this game and any other games that have this same feature. Because you will get a random fighter fragments, you will have to grind a lot just to get gold to buy the packs. Sometimes you might not get any fragment at all. Each fighter have four characters, one for each for its star level or rarity. To unlock each character of each fighter you need 10 fragments of the same star level for that fighter. So in total you need to collect 40 fragments for each fight if you want to unlock each star level character.

It is so hard to get fragments to even unlock the 1 star fighters. So far I've only unlock one 1 star fighter using the fragments.

VI. The most frustrating part is when you keep getting duplicate fragments for the fighter. That duplicate fragment will be converted into a random Waza card.

VII. There's no key combination for any moves or special moves. Tekken is famous for button mashing kind of play but I guess Bandai Namco doesn't want you to destroy your phone playing this mobile version... LOL!

VIII. The online fight is not a live fight. You will fight those fighter that have been set to defend others' Dojo.

IX. The exp points and gold you get from winning a fight seems to be fixed at 100 each. The total exp point for you to level up is keep on increasing with each level. You need to grind a lot! Like my account below, to get to level 13 I need to collect 15,900 exp points. So I need to win 159 fights to get there.

X. The items like healing cube have a limited fixed cap of how many you can keep and there's no way to increase that cap. If it is full and you get a new ones from the pack, it will be discarded! With that fixed limit, it's hard to play this game for a very long session unless you're so good that you won't make your fighter injured or KO. I normally stop playing when I'm out of healing cube and all my fighters are all KO.

Putting a limit cap to these kind of items is kind of stupid but smart enough to suck up money from those who were not patient to wait for their fighter to heal fully (that could take hours) before going to another fight.

There are more but I guess those are enough for me to share. Maybe if you're interested, you can download and play it yourself, it's free anyway. The only thing that might happen is that this game will survive for very long. I've played some games like this before and the longest I played it is for 5 months then I felt like it's not worth playing especially when the temptation of spending money is very high. I don't mind paying and buying some cheap packs but if the game is very repetitive and you need to keep grinding hard, I might well just play the PC or console version, which is more fun!

Anyway, if you're a fan of Tekken go try this game and if you're just a mobile gamer that prefer playing game just on your phone, this game is for you. But for gamers like me who prefer to play the PC/console version over the mobile one, I guess I will only play this game for a few weeks or few months, lets see.