As you play the fifth sequel in the Dead or Alive series, you may be gripped by the feeling that you’ve seen all that there is to see in the fighting game genre. Sure, Dead or Alive 6 offers up features that are new to the series, like blood effects and a super meter, but those are bells and whistles culled from a decades-old industry playbook for games of this sort. Meanwhile, the most distinguishing factors of the Dead or Alive franchise—from an emphasis on counters to its interactive stages—have long lost their luster or, in the case of their sexily dressed female characters, curdled into predictable fetishism. If the goal of Dead or Alive 6 is to appear over-familiar, this entry is a roaring success.
If you’ve never played a Dead or Alive game, there are few fighting styles and moves here that don’t bring to mind other 3D fighters, such as the titles in the Virtua Fighter and Tekken series. Developer Team Ninja surely knows this is the case, and so it attempts to woo its predominantly male audience with a cast of mainly young female martial artists, some of whom, based on their playful attire and attitude, feel as they’ve been pulled from a daddy/daughter fetish porn. While Dead or Alive 5 added visible sweat to character bodies, Dead or Alive 6 opens up the possibility for dirt to accumulate on the skin and attire of its fighters. One might say this addition reflects the consequences of battle, but once you see, say, a very young and coquettish woman with soiled stockings, it’s clear that the game is primarily aiming to titillate by serving up a lite version of mud wrestling.
One of the defining concepts of the Dead or Alive series is a button that allows you to reverse the various melee attacks of your opponents. The idea behind this mechanic is to give the player a toolkit that can stop competitors from spamming kicks and punches. In theory, dedicating a button to counterattacks encourages an evolution of action, forcing rivals to mix up their combinations and approaches to avoid being stopped. But rather than lean into or reimagine this standby, Dead or Alive 6 includes an additional special button that plays off the Break Gauge, essentially a super meter. As in many fighting games, the gauge fills up as you inflict and take damage. When filled enough, the gauge enables you to initiate offensive and defensive techniques with the special button. But at this stage in the genre’s history, the meter and its associated moves feel less like an innovative wrinkle to a formula and more like a capitulation to a trend popularized by Capcom’s Street Fighter series.
Perhaps the most endearing aspect of Dead or Alive 6 is its stages, specifically their different environmental effects. One level has scattered explosives waiting to be triggered. Another boasts an electrified barrier. In a particularly entertaining arena, you can smash your opponent into a giant egg that inspires a mother pterodactyl to snatch and drop the unfortunate recipient of your blow. Yet even this one clever moment carries a hint of staleness, as it’s quite reminiscent of the disruptive dinos on a similar stage in Dead or Alive 4.
In line with its predecessors and some of its contemporaries, Dead or Alive 6 lets you juggle opponents in the air after you knock them off their feet, but the game demands virtually no skill for its ridiculous displays of unanswerable hits. Eating away 30-to-50 percent of a foe’s health bar with juggles here is only slightly more complex than dialing a phone number. Contradicting the franchise’s dedication to counters, the game’s juggling mechanic leaves your victims completely helpless. It’s another reminder that running old tricks into the ground in order to reward the fanboy’s thirst for domination, and in unchecked fashion, will be the legacy of Dead or Alive 6 and so many other fighting games.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by ONE PR Studio.
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