Price: £39.99 Players: 1-2 Widescreen: No 60Hz: No DTS sound: No As you start Tekken 5, a cool CGI intro concludes "Heihachi Mishima…is dead" Hmm... would they kill off the Tekken franchise's favourite old-timer? I somehow doubt that. Take your pick from the athletic Julie and Nina, the muscle-bound Jin, the lion-faced King, schoolgirl Xiaoyu, wedgehead Paul and Christie who looks a bit like J-Lo, except more attractive and a lot less self-obsessed, as well as a number of others including some to be unlocked later.

In addition to the standard arcade mode, comes the Story Battle where you get to play through the game and follow a character's story, with their movie appearing after the last baddie has been defeated. 'Vs Battle' is the two-player arcade game while Time Attack is the straight-forward option of clearing the game in the fastest time. Practice, Survival and Team Battle are typical options that also return here. Something new comes with 'Arcade History' as it allows you to play the arcade version of the first three games in the Tekken series, but the graphics don't date particularly well. For the graphics, the movement of the characters is fluid and the gameplay is just as you'd expect, with this user occasionally opting for random button mashing to get me through, but the environments are not much to shout about in that while they can look quite nice at times - I was quite impressed with the 'Final Frontier' one with the Pacman message running down the side - there's nothing interactive about them.

Various items occasionally might appear to fly off them as if dislodged when hit but these are just extraneous graphics and there's nothing that can be picked up and used. Also, on some levels the ground appears to break up when either you or the enemy thud into it, but the effect is immediately lost the next time someone hits the ground as the first part instantly heals up(!) The sound packs a punch, as you'd expect for a fighting game, but there's nothing to differentiate that here from any other such game and there's also no DTS sound so it's ProLogic-only. There's a different extra that we've not seen before in this series, Devil Within, which places you as Jin going into the Mishima Zaibatsu and G Corporation headquarters, running down corridors in third-person view from behind, kicking robots to pieces along the way, but this kind of thing has been done many times before and far better, particularly since the fighting has been reduced to basic kicking and punching moves, so it's nothing to get excited about here.

Overall, this game may have received a reasonablish final score, but the graphics and sound boosted that. If you're wondering whether it's worth shelling out another forty notes on this fighting game then it isn't - it doesn't do anything more than any fighting game I've played before. In fact, I preferred Virtua Fighter 4 to this, PS2-wise, but if you have an Xbox then Dead or Alive Ultimate provides better graphics all round. DOAU also had DD5.1 sound whereas this game eschews the chance to offer top-notch sound, widescreen format, a 60Hz picture and online action. If in doubt, and if you're a Tekken-only fan, rent this and then make a decision but if you've played all the previous entries in the series you'll be hard-pushed to make this a must-have.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2005.