The Heat System more than makes up for it. However, Rage Drive has been done away with completely, and there’s a good reason. Lower health means bigger Rage Art damage. Once your health is low enough, you can bust out a trump card move with the press of a button, doing big damage that increases based on the life you have left. Rage is still here, but only with Rage Arts. “Aggression” is a keyword Katsuhiro Harada and the rest of the Tekken devs have been stressing around frequently as a core pillar of the game, and now I see why. The Heat System is at the core of the most important changes to Tekken 8’s battle system. Simply put, the new Heat System is a game-changer and the way we approach offense and mind games in Tekken is about to truly evolve into something spectacular. However, I couldn’t have guessed just how different this game would be when I sat down to play an early build.

I knew Tekken 8 was going to be quite a step forward for Bandai Namco when they announced they were switching to Unreal Engine 5 to build the new game from the ground up. Case in point: the Tekken franchise has gone through all sorts of evolutions over the years, from the tag-teaming of Tekken Tag Tournament to the Rage System first introduced in Tekken 6. It’s not often I can call to mind a game that reinvents itself successfully while keeping the core of the franchise perfectly intact.

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