Dead Or Alive 6 Has a Good Fight On Its Hands At E3 2018

When you take a gander at Dead Or Alive 6, you'll find the realization that it's not your typical entry in the series. Whereas previous entries put girls in skimpy bikini-style costumes or school girl get-ups, this one focuses less on going sexy with everything and more on what made the series so appealing in the first place. And that would be its gameplay.

Koei Tecmo recently gave us the chance to go hands-on with the game to see how concentrated the fighting was; and while it's still an early work in progress (it only has four fighters in the roster right now with a ways to go), it's got the potential to be one of the best, if not the best, in the series to date.

We had a go-around with Kasumi, one of the traditional fighters in the series. She's actually been given a suave leather outfit that covers up her usual voluptuousness, but makes up for it in spades with her fast, rapid movement. We were able to deliver a number of deadly blows to our opponents with her kicks, while at the same time putting together potential combos for even more damage to the opponents' meter.

But some of the traditional Dead Or Alive systems have gone through a bit of tweaking. Counters are still intact, but feel more like they're earned when you turn the tables on someone, rather than every match turn into a "you counter, then I counter and then you counter again" scenario. It feels more balanced this way.

Also, there are now super concentrated attacks. Not full blown supers, mind you, but rather techniques where you can land a devastating blow on your opponent, followed by a slo-mo punch to their face that looks unbelievably cinematic. You can even see the reaction of who you're hitting (or rather, getting hit by if they deliver the blow), and feel the oomph behind their punch.

This adds extraordinary detail to each character that is in the game, along with their already fluid movements. The game as a whole just looks fantastic thus far, even though we've only seen the one stage and DOA 6 is moving at 30 FPS, down from the usual speed of 60. We're sure that Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo will get that up to snuff by next year however.

One thing we did like, though, was the interactivity with the stage. You can break through a barrier in fight in a different area, as you could with previous games. And bigger stages will once again introduce multi-tiered stages where you can knock an opponent off, do damage to them on the way down and then keep fighting. The only true interaction here were crowd members pushing your brawler back into the mix, but it was still great fun.

It's still early days yet for Dead Or Alive 6, as it's still a ways off from its 2019 release for Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But we loved what we played so far, and we can't wait to go back for more. Besides, who can resist Kasumi? Not I.