But as soon as that first hit lands all bets are off – you could be in for a few smacks around the chops, or 30 seconds of watching your guy get battered from pillar to post without a chance of intervening. When two fighters are facing each other, poking away and looking for an opening, it plays in a similar manner to Street Fighter IV. It's the most eye-catching aspect of Street Fighter X Tekken, and it also ends up as its Achilles' Heel. At its most complex, or so it seems initially, switching can mean health-bar chomping multitasking where the victim doesn't touch the ground. Often it can be used mid-combo, if you can manage some extremely tight timings, to pull off ridiculously long strings. At its simplest this means launching an enemy when low on health, and storming in with a charged-up dragon punch. More than anything else, it's about team play, with the fights constantly punctuated by character switches.

Sometimes whole flurries are exchanged without anything breaking at all, both fighters pirouetting away from the maelstrom in a brief second of calm before charging headlong back in.

There are back-and-forth grudge matches ending in Super combos, blood-and-thunder offensives that bully opponents to death, and knockdown- drag-out wars of attrition where the final blow is a light tap on the ankle. In full flow Street Fighter X Tekken can turn up some incredible fights. In Tekken things are a bit messier: there are fixed high-damage combos, but it's possible to interject other moves, especially when your opponent's not fighting back. There, a snappy input pulls off a devastatingly smooth series of moves. It's a more fluid system than Street Fighter's more rigid hierarchy of combos. Keeping your opponent in the air can be tricky, but it's always possible to tag a few extra hits on. In Tekken, when an opponent has been hit and is in mid-air, you can follow-up with attacks that can't be blocked and will end only when that victim hits the ground. The second is the importance of 'juggling'. The first is that in Tekken each button maps to a specific limb on the fighter, as opposed to Street Fighter's six-button system of light, medium and heavy punches and kicks. There are two key differences, which Street Fighter X Tekken has a real go at bringing together. Most Street Fighter games have eventually found their way to the PC, but we've been largely spared the winding history of Tekken.

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