Stupid Warcraft. Ok, neglecting blog duties isn't entirely Blizzard's fault, but still. Stupid, stupid Warcraft.
Let's rap about Tekken. When I first got down with it a couple of months ago now, I indicted it on counts of being too hardcore to be a successful fee-to-play game, and not exactly easy to recommend in its thin state. But Namco has been fairly active in supporting it since the launch, so I find it ethically compelling in my own way to revisit my thoughts on how Revolution has evolved.
Maybe "evolved" isn't as fair to say as maybe "grew." Since launching, the roster has beefed up by seven additional characters, now topping the whole list off at 18 and counting. Yes, it still takes a significant amount of time and/ or cash to actually unlock them, but if you play at its most base level and not pay a dime, a new character is added to the list close to the same time that you might have unlocked the last one, which keeps the carrot dangling in front of your face. Thankfully, the Tekken universe has (actually) evolved to such a degree in the last few years that every character is completely unique, so you'll never feel as though you were just cheated into getting a palette-swap after weeks of grinding for gift points.
The grinding, though, has probably been the most impressive trait of Namco's constant support over the last few months. By that I mean that they've done their best to make it fairly painless with the constant stream of weekly events. In some weeks you may earn more fight money or experience to boost the levels of your characters, while in others it bestow a 1.5x multiplier on your gift points to make unlockables a bit easier. There have been special events, though, that keep the game fascinating. A few weeks ago, players could go through a special offline 1 player mode fighting only the training dummy Mokujin, which gave massive bonuses to fight money, exp, and gift points for each run through. Entries to this Mokujin mode were granted once per day, but further entries were winnable in online and offline matches at random. Sure, the actual mode was every bit as easy as the standard Arcade mode, but it was easy to unlock multiple character in half the time and test them out while working to open up more.
Clearly, the most welcome addition is the Warm-Up Space, which is a rudimentary training mode. While there's no way to customize it (such as choosing stances and blocking for the AI), an offline mode with no barrier for entry serves as a big leap in solving the main problem I had with the game before. New players can learn their move lists and form combos without the threat of loss and the internal struggle to either shell out for more coins for various modes or wait another 30 minutes for a shot at the title. It's a great addition.
So, should you play Tekken Revolution now? I say yes; it a steady drip of new content and a way to practice offline solves a lot of issues with it. Learning moves offline will never make you a great player, so getting down in it and fighting in ranked or player matches is still the name of the game. But the gulf between the green recruit and the more practiced-hand can logically be reduced now, if just a little bit. That's good stuff.
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