Tekken 8 is quickly approaching the three-month mark since it first launched at the end of January, and it’s looking like the new game sheen has aleady lost a fair bit of its luster.
Following a mixture of issues inside the game and out as well as some less popular business decisions, Tekken 8’s previously strong reviews have now dipped into the red.
If you now take a look at the official Steam page for Bandai Namco’s flagship 3D fighting game, its recent reviews have slipped to “Mixed” and now full on “Mostly Negative.”
The overall review rating (with 18,000 entries) is still “Mostly Positive” while the recent category with almost 4,000 responses are apparently a lot of thumbs down now.
So how did we get to this point?
Even though there is some probable troll review bombing going on with a few we’ve seen requesting that characters like Alisa get deleted from the game, much of the complaints seem to stem back to the addition of the Tekken Shop and kinda snowballed from there.
The Tekken Shop introduced “new” premium and free content to the game like costumes and accessories where some voiced their displeasure about the developers reworking items from prior entries and not being able to unlock them.
Longtime Director Katsuhiro Harada has defended this extra layer of monetization by stating development costs for Tekken 8 were three times as much as even for Tekken 7 while actual game prices have only increased $10 USD.
Fans have also been irked, however, by the simultaneous inclusion of Tekken Coins as a premium currency that we’ve seen pop up similarly in other major fighting games like Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1.
Now, players can’t simply just buy the additional content they would actually want to spend money on, but rather buy bundles of increasing prices made to make users spend more and have some left over so they feel the need to do so again in the future.
This issue was further compounded by the implementation of a battle pass system for the first time in the series, and while the Tekken Fight Pass does have free rewards, it’s another way of Bamco trying to get players to spend money.
Some are also complaining that they can’t ignore the pass either because the game displays their experience progress after every online match, which admittedly isn’t too unusual for games with this type of system.
On top of that, April’s main update that brought in Eddy Gordo and the Tekken Fight Pass also introduced a number of gameplay bugs and issues to the game with a good chunk of them needing to be fixed subsequently.
There are multiple negative reviews put forth not necessarily for the game itself, but for Bandai Namco allegedly targeting some Tekken modders and taking down YouTube channels and costumes.
For the other most common negative responses, there’s also ongoing crashing issues for some hardware setups, problems with pluggers / rage quitters and some who are still having trouble playing online at all.
Much of this is also reflected in recent user reviews on Metacritic as well with the majority of ratings for Tekken 8 being mostly 0-3/10 though PC specifically is dealing with the crashes and mods on top of issues they’re taking with the game.
With some top competitors like DRX|Knee coming out and saying too that they’re not having fun with Tekken 8, it’s created more of a negative air around the game currently, but certainly not everything is doom and gloom.
Tekken 8 is still being played consistently and significantly more than its predecessor though numbers have dropped since launch like any game.
The Tekken World Tour 2024 is now underway with Evo Japan 2024 taking place this weekend to show what the global competitive space is looking like for the new game for the first time, which is going to gather a lot of attention.
And as an overall package, Tekken 8 still has a lot of good going for it that the majority of players were seeming to have a good time with (at the start at least).
Considering how long most major fighters are supported these days, Tekken 8 is not going anywhere any time soon with years of updates and additions ahead that’ll likely drastically change the game up from where it is today.
While we don’t see the Tekken Shop, battle pass, and Tekken Coins really going anywhere, the hope is the developers and Bamco higher ups really listen to fans to keep them happier and fighting in the game instead of fighting about issues with it.
