Street Fighter X Tekken

Platform: Sony Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Price:$59.99 (PS3, Xbox 360), $69.99 (Special Edition)

I could never really get into the Tekken games. I was always more of a Street Fighter fan.  I've dabbled in Tekken before... I put in a lot of hours with Tekken 3 on my Playstation back in the day.  But I was never really any good.  Maybe it was the extra added dimension, maybe it was my inability to string together 10 hit combos. 

Street Fighter X Tekken, like the name suggests brings together the worlds of Street Fighter and Tekken on a 2D plane.  So for all you Tekken players who are looking to sidestep your way past hadokens, you'll probably have to wait for Tekken X Street Fighter.  If you've played any of Street Fighter 4's iterations, you'll feel right at home.  For the most part, all of the Street Fighter characters control as they would in their native games.  (I should hope so considering this game was developed by Capcom...) But the normal attacks chain together much more easily than in Street Fighter 4.  It almost feels like the Street Fighter Alpha series of years ago.  Surprisingly, the Tekken characters also feel like themselves (or at least what I remember of them).  A lot of the combos the Tekken characters have were translated from their games and the ability to juggle characters in the air with combos makes them feel right at home.

In the game, you pick a pair of characters to challenge your opponents.  Instead of adopting the Capcom tag team system, for example in the Marvel vs Capcom series where both characters need to be defeated, Street Fighter X Tekken adopts a Tekken Tag Tournament version, where if one character goes down you lose the round.  You can switch characters in and out at will, even bringing in your partner to extend combos.  You can even bring both characters on screen at the same time, in dramatic battle fashion, beating down your opponent in a (mostly unfair) 2 on 1 showdown. 

The game also introduces a power up system of gems.  There are two types of gems, active ones that make some of the mechanics easier (like automatically escaping from throws) and passive ones (like giving a power or speed boost).  At first glance, the gems seem like they would cause a huge imbalance in matches, but I haven't found that to be true.  (Or possibly I haven't found the right combination of gems and characters.)  But the gem system adds a little customization to an otherwise straightforward fighting game. 

Rating

I'm not going to lie, I had little interest in playing Street Fighter X Tekken.  But the crazy Playstation exclusive characters kind of got me excited right before the game came out.  Who can resist the lure of Fat Mega Man?  But playing the game was a lot of fun, even without those characters.  If you're like me and haven't played a Tekken game in over a decade, "rent" this one and see what you think...