Rage Mode is a powered-up mode that activates when a player drops to the last third (or so) of their health. The largest new addition to the world of Tekken in this title seems to also take a page from Street Fighter, and that's Rage Mode and Rage Arts. The roster will continue to expand as the game nears its release, and I'm curious who'll make it. There were already well over 20 characters available in this build including several newcomers I didn't have time to fully try out, though there's still some Tekken favourites absent. Far more important is the versus battling and the character roster. Story only takes you so far in a fighter, of course. My fondest memories of Tekken games are of over-the-top CG ending movies with characters being tossed into volcanoes and somehow surviving, and though I wasn't able to glimpse much of the story beyond what everyone will have already seen on Microsoft's stage I get the strong impression that Tekken's ludicrous anime-style antics are well suited to a built-in cinematic story mode. An advantage that Tekken has is that it feels suited for it. Mortal Kombat popularized it with its ninth entry, and Street Fighter launches a similar story mode soon.

This sort of story presentation is nothing new, of course. As glimpsed in the Microsoft conference, he's the focus of the E3 story demo that was available for hands-on, pitting him off against Heihachi Mishima in a brutal-looking fight that seamlessly transitions from story sequences into regular Tekken bouts. Given Akuma's status as a deadly slugger, he fits the Tekken universe perfectly. There's something slightly more sluggish about his movements, and certainly a sense of weight to the impact of his attacks - and that's the Tekken influence.

That's the best possible thing I can report about Tekken 7: Akuma looks, feels, sounds and moves like the real thing, and his controls have been well adapted to Tekken's button setup. I love a bit of Tekken, but my heart really belongs to Street Fighter and so of course he was my first go-to pick in my hands-on.

The result is Akuma in Tekken 7, and he's, well, Akuma. He's not just a guest character but a major part of the story, and taking a look at how he appears in the game one gets the impression that perhaps Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada made the decision that he didn't want to let the completed concept work on a Street Fighter cross-over go to waste. Tekken 7 has been around in Japanese arcades for a while now complete with Akuma, but his importance to the game was underlined in Tekken 7's surprise appearance at Microsoft's E3 2016 press conference. While I'm a little disappointed that Tekken X Street Fighter is on a sort of 'indefinite hold' in development purgatory after the stumbling performance of Capcom's Street Fighter X Tekken, we've rather lucked out: excitement for Street Fighter mechanics in the Tekken universe can be easily transferred to Tekken 7 thanks to the addition of Akuma, the evil king of the Ansatsuken branch of martial arts. 'That's the best possible thing I can report about Tekken 7: Akuma looks, feels, sounds and moves like the real thing, and his controls have been well adapted to Tekken's button setup.'

Tekken 7 is a richer game for adopting Street Fighter moves, says Alex Donaldson.

Akuma tekken 7