Tekken 7 Is Bringing Back Jack

Namco Bandai has announced another character for the ever-growing roster of Tekken 7, this time it's Jack, a long time pugilist who has undergone many, many transformations throughout the long running fighting game series. This newest iteration of Jack is appropriately named Jack 7. You can see him in action below with the first gameplay trailer of the character.

The video does a rundown of Jack's moves and abilities, including many of his combos, counter attacks, grabs and special moves. A lot of his attacks are returning from the previous games. He uses a sort of slow, lumbering fighting style where many of the combos are focuses on his long reach and ability to swat, swing and smack opponents with his clubbing blows. Story wise, Jack has always been a cyborg and he's likely going to return in that role for Tekken 7... whether as a good guy or a bad guy remains to be seen.

A lot of Jack's machine-gun style punching combos are back and they're accompanied with some new moves, including his ability to grab, rocket-punch and then blast opponents in the face. One of his new grab moves includes throwing opponents in the air and then rapidly shooting them with his machine-gun fists.

Some of these moves are advancements on some of Jack 6's moves from Tekken 6, where he had a few more vertical air-juggles added to his movelist repertoire. In Tekken 7 Bandai Namco has made the gameplay even smoother, the combos even more seamless than before. The fact the game is running 60 smooth-as-butter frames per second helps with being able to execute more moves within a shorter amount of time and coincides nicely with low-latency controller input. It may not seem like a big thing, but even as you can see in the trailer above, Jack is moving as fast as he's ever moved and players who may have been reluctant to play as the character before due to his stiff and limited moveset, might reconsider. I mean, just check out this combo montage of Jack from Tekken 5 just for comparison's sake.

Huge step up eh?

Even with top tier players dropping mean combos in Tekken 5 or Tekken 6 it pales in comparison to the levels of smoothness and speed that Namco is going for with Tekken 7. The newest game has a back and forth level of intensity that we've been seeing lately in newer fighting games such as Mortal Kombat X and the upcoming Street Fighter V where it almost looks like the fights could come right out of an animated movie as opposed to just watching two pugilists go back and forth.

You'll likely see Jack 7 and many of your other favorite (and hated) characters in Tekken 7 make an appearance at this year's upcoming EVO 2015 series. Tekken 7 is supposedly set to release for home consoles and potentially PC. You can keep track of the game by paying a visit to the official website.