Shacknews Best Fighting Game of 2024 - Tekken 8

When a game comes out very early in the year, it has a strong chance of falling out of the conversation, even if that game is great. Tekken 8, on the other hand, had no such issues. It may have come out in January 2024, but the sheer depth of content and online play in the game made for a fantastic year of 3D fighting that only got better as more arenas, characters, and content were added.

Tekken 8 started off on a very strong foot despite the stress of the Tekken development team bringing the franchise to Unreal Engine 5 for the first time. They rebuilt the game from the ground up, crafting each character, stage, and the rest of the visuals from scratch. The end result is that Tekken 8 looks about as beautiful as fighters have gotten so far and the stages are incredibly fun to play with their interactable options.

Of course, if the fighting didn’t feel good, all this visual spice wouldn’t amount to much. Thankfully, Tekken 8’s combat feels incredible. The Heat System made every single character feel fresh in one way or another, offering access to new attacks, a way to dash after your opponent for otherwise unconnectable combos, and a stylish character-unique strike to cash out that empowered state. Bandai Namco also added a Special control style that allows players to access auto combos and an easy-to-use control format that can be toggled off and on with one button as the match carries on, which is good if you’re a newcomer or just playing a character with which you aren’t familiar.

There’s also a massive array of ways to play this game. Tekken 8 has plenty of online and offline modes, including solid online lobbies with well-implemented rollback netcode, arcade-style playthroughs, a lengthy story mode, and one of the best training mode systems ever put in a fighting game. That last one is huge because it feels like this is where Tekken 8 innovates the most. We got features like punishment training for countering attacks, combo trials for learning certain character strings, frame data, and, perhaps most importantly, save/load states where you can make a state during a combo and work on later ends of your strings. You can even take over replays of your old matches to practice punishes and alternative routes you could have used to win the match.

Tekken 8 is a bold new era for the franchise that looks and plays beautifully, and it has aged like fine wine as the year went on with the additions of online training, new characters, an extra story chapter, and more. It also feels like one of the most welcoming entries for newcomers ever while still featuring enough technical gameplay to satisfy competitive masters. Like Street Fighter 6 before it and Guilty Gear Strive before that, Tekken 8 continues to add fuel to the fire of this incredible time in fighting games, and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down in the years ahead.

Be sure to read over the rest of the Shacknews Awards in our Year of the Games: 2024 feature.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on BlueSky @JohnnyChugs.