Street Fighter x Tekken DLC review

Street Fighter x Tekken is a game that’s seen quite a few bumps along the way since its release. Not only did the game launch with several game breaking bugs, wild character imbalances (I’m looking at you Rolento, you over powered megalomaniac), overall poor netcode there was also wild community outrage at Capcom’s inclusion of nearly complete DLC on the disc at launch. This was discovered rather quickly by hackers, and led quite a few people to completely dismiss the game, despite it being quite good. It harkens back to the days of the more technical crossover games, such as Capcom vs SNK 2. We thought it was so good at the time, we gave it a 9/10.

Over time, Capcom has listened to the community, and has released several patches addressing some character imbalances, as well as glitch fixes. Though it took a bit longer than I may have liked, this is Capcom we’re talking about – the same company that doesn’t believe in releasing more balance patches than one a year. So for them to touch the game at all was a big improvement.  The community at large is still asking for one big balance fix, so hopefully that happens soon.

DLC characters

At time of writing, nothing has been announced, so even with this DLC (which Capcom could’ve taken the extra time to balance the characters, given that they were almost complete months ago), there are still wild imbalances that will impact players at the highest level. Though, if you’re just a casual player throwing down with your friends, you probably won’t notice much.

That’s not to say that the game has been completely unsuccessful in the past few months, especially with a fairly strong showing at Evolution 2012 and several community figures taking to the game, such as famed combotician Desk or Maximillian.

street fighter x tekken

However, the DLC is finally here. Is the cost worth it? The answer, for the most part, is yes. The DLC adds twelve characters, six from the Street Fighter universe (Blanka, Sakura, Guy, Cody, Dudley, Elena), six from the Tekken universe (Jack, Bryan Fury, Alisa, Lars, Lei and Christie). This adds an exponential amount of combinations with the game’s existing characters, and brings the total cast to upwards of 50, depending on which version of the game you own. Honestly, if the DLC had added a mode or two, it would’ve released as Super Street Fighter x Tekken, but I’m pretty sure an angry mob would’ve booked a plane to Japan as soon as it was announced, so they wisely avoided that road.  Regardless, the metagame for character selection has changed so much; it may as well be called that.  The new characters are all fun to play, and fit in well with the current cast both balance wise and flavor wise.

So other than new characters, what else has changed? Nothing really. So in closing, if you really liked Street Fighter x Tekken for its more strategic take on the crossover fighter, or if want to take your team to a local tournament or perhaps all the way to the Evolution Championship Series, you should pick this up. If not – It’s probably not worth picking up if you weren’t a fan of any of the added characters. It’s worth noting that if these characters were released in the industry standard of $5 per character, you’d be looking at a full $60 purchase, so whichever way you spin it – it’s a bargain.

[Reviewed on Xbox 360]

Dustin Steiner is GameZone's eSports Correspondent! Follow him on Twitter @VGHC_Deitis and check out Video Gaming Hard Corps, where he is a local tournament organizer for the S. FL. Fighting Game Community.