The Tekken community has seemingly found a go-to strategy for expressing itself when it’s upset about something, as Tekken 8 has been review bombed after the launch of the fighting game’s third season, and this isn’t the first time the game has been the target of such a tactic.
As TheGamer lays out, Tekken 8 has received hundreds of negative reviews on Steam following the season three launch last week. Players who have racked up hundreds of hours of playtime are lashing out at Bandai Namco over balance issues, saying that Tekken 8 has become so offense-focused that the game only rewards those with aggressive playstyles.
“Tekken 8 general rule of thumb: You must defend from all of your opponent’s bullshit so you can take their 50-50 mixups after,” writes one player.
“Delusional devs,” another player writes. “Each patch buffs offense and adds new moves, instead of buffing [defense]. In all other Tekken games, [including] T8 season one, I had fun even when losing because I knew what I was doing wrong and could learn from these situations, but now it’s [a] matter [of] who plays more aggressive[…]The fighting is not fun anymore.”
“If you don’t want to be in an abusive relationship, then use your money to get a better loving partner that treats you better than Tekken 8 does to it’s own fans,” another review reads. “Seriously y’all deserve better than the gaslighting, money hungry, cheapskate, and tone deaf crap we’re getting here dude.”
One of the less colorful reviews simply reads “Just play Tekken 7.”
The season three patch was touted as a “back to basics” update that would start to nudge the game into a more streamlined state, but Bandai Namco said this would be a gradual process, rather than a full-blown reboot of the game’s systems. Now that the update is out, fans aren’t thrilled with the direction the game is going and are making that known in both Steam reviews and places like the subreddit.
This isn’t the first time Tekken 8 fans have used this tactic to express some dissatisfaction with the game’s balance state. If you look at the Steam user review timeline, you’ll also notice that thousands of negative reviews came in when Bandai Namco put out the season two update in April of last year. Things balanced out in the months that followed with the game getting a more even split of positive and negative reviews, but overall, Tekken 8 is still sitting at a “mixed” rating on Steam. The console ratings are much kinder, with both PlayStation and Xbox sitting at around four out of five stars, but perhaps that just speaks to where folks make their complaints known, as Steam’s user reviews are much more visible than those in the consoles’ equivalent systems.