DEAD OR ALIVE 6

best game

this game is an huge letdown. even when it first released it was very barebones and even took tech away after the first few months of gameplay, stamina bar used to have 2 ticks and didnt use one for sidesteps but the devs decided to make a huge gameplay tweak by adding 2 more ticks and making sidesteps take one. final note the dlc season pass costed 90 dollars for a handful of costumes and a character or 2 it was a failure of a cash grab. it sucks cause it couldve been fixed but a year after release this games support was dropped... Beeg sad for DoA

Great!

Probably my favourite 3D fighting game. The game feels really fun and fluid to play, I adore the different holds and throws characters can utilise to change the tide of matches, the character designs are cool and DoA Quest is a nice change of pace from standard matches. The DLC is a bit much and there's missing modes compared to DoA5, but even still there's something about this game that is just fun to mess around in and has character.

r

Deluxe Edition Good fighting game to play alone or with friends finally decided to pick it up since its on sale for a good price.

DOA was always a phenomenal game, this plays so well on my ally that kicking butt on the go is just a fun pass time now.

Setting aside the obvious intent of the game, gameplay itself is fun, but there isn't a lot there to keep you much engaged. Story is very short and kinda of disjointed and the guest characters don't matter at all. I only recommended if you want to play a 3D fighter with a unique fighting system, and the... other reason.

best childhood game

Very fun.
Gameplay is intense and balanced, nothing too complicated.
Probably the best 3D fighter I have played. Looks great and is very underrated.
(It seems covid times hurt this game with seeing any continued future development F.Y.I.)

good fighting game. could be better.

the ultimate fighting game

I don't play fighting games much these days, but back in the day used to enjoy them, and Dead or Alive 3 on PS2 was one of my favourites. Dead or Alive 6 built on what the older games in this series were good at. The fighting feels fluid, each impact can be felt, you can string some impressive combos, and there is a nice parry system. And as a bonus, there are lots of beautiful female characters. ;)

Now, I don't really like playing games such as this online, so my entire review is based on single player experience. And gladly there is plenty to do if you don't wish to play online. There's story mode of course. Then there's a quest mode, where you're given certain tasks to perform during fights. Then there are the usual modes that you can normally expect in fighting games - arcade (fight through a series of battles and try to get as high score as possible), time attack (fight through a series of battles and try to win in as shortest time as possible), survival (keep facing new opponents with the same character till you're defeated), and versus mode (fight 1 on 1 against another player or a computer). There is also training mode where you can practice moves and get a hang of the game or a particular character.

In many of the game modes where you face computer opponents, you can choose between multiple difficulty levels, so you can get enjoyment from the game whether you're new to the genre or a veteran. Playing on higher difficulty modes gets you bigger rewards. The rewards are usually in-game coins and also costume pattern points. These are mainly needed for unlocking new costumes for characters - and there are plenty of those. In the versus mode, you can set additional options to make it more fun - number of rounds, amount of health, round time, etc. Oh and you can save a replay of the whole fight here if you want to re-watch it later.

Ok, let's address the elephant in the room - the massive list of DLCs the game has. Many people frown upon this sort of thing - having to buy many DLCs for a game that already has a high price point. However, vast majority of DLCs for this game are merely character costumes and aren't necessary to get. Only 7 DLCs are additional characters. But that's only 7 DLC characters in a game that has a total of over 30 characters. So the base game already provides you with almost 25 characters, and the DLC characters are not necessarily stronger or better (though having them sure can add more to the game; they're not particularly expensive). As for the costumes - many of the costumes can only be unlocked in-game, while others are paid DLCs. There's no necessity to buying them all. Most are fan service and sexy costumes for female characters. So if you really want some of that, you can get a few of them for characters you use frequently to spice up their look a bit.

There are lots of fighting games out there, and each series has its own distinct strengths and features. Mortal Kombat is all about gore and maximum brutality, Soul Calibur is great for its variety of fancy weapons, Street Fighter for faster-paced fights with lots of flashy effects, and so on. Dead or Alive to me is more grounded in reality, with more realistic moves and combos (aside from a few elements of fantasy and sci-fi in the backstories and abilities of some characters), no over-the-top blood and entrails, and no "10 punches in less than a second" kind of thing, but its pacing is still fast and fluid. And as mentioned before, Dead or Alive has hands down the best-looking girls, in quality and quantity.

One thing that's been a little on the annoying side for me is that in some stages, there is a large number of humans in the background and/or special effects, so the game can lag a bit on those stages. Wish it was possible to switch off those parts of the environment to improve performance.

I recommend it to those who enjoy fighting games or who are new to the genre and want a satisfying and not too complicated game as a good entry point. It's certainly a good relaxation to just whack a few enemies with impressive combos after you've had a long day.

This is a good game.

Don't like the purchasing additional characters, but good game.

Graphical and performance(?) improvements aside, this game feels like a downgrade from the previous titles ngl🤷

Best Fucking game ever

Actually a really fluid and fun fighting game

The Gameplay in General is Fun but it is brought down by a lot of glaring factors. The time it takes to unlock all "available" costumes is so mind numbing and long it makes you not want to play this game, I spent over 33 hours trying to unlock costumes and I am not half way done. There is also still the eyesore of being in the character screen and any costumes that are not available still appear as "Locked" on the screen, it would have been better to not show it at All. It also doesn't have Tag matchup which is annoying.

micro transactions in a paid game, ::thumbs down::

For me, there a couple reasons I like DOA over Tekken.
- The graphics are smoother
- Hits and movement is smoother
- Juggles can be more easily broken or defended against
- More sex-appeal

However, this installment really strikes out in a few ways that make me tell people to run back to DOA 5LR as the best game in the entire franchise.
- There are times when the hit boxes don't make sense and a hit from 3 feet away connects.
It makes it look like a showy wrestling fight than a real fight.
- Costume unlocking is tedious and makes you grind way more than you should.
- The family tree gets more complicated.
- The sex-appeal gets muted a bit. Perhaps because of pressure.
- It felt like there could be more story.

slayed

better than any guilty gear game (ma-ma-ma-maybach music)

This port is at least better than the 5th Games port, Will work with PS5 Controllers too, just unfortunately can't show the buttons.

Not as good as 5.

I bought the game.
Surely they'll make DOA7 now.

HOT CHICKS, HOT OUTFITS. NEED I SAY MORE.

Dead or Alive es una franquicia a la que le tengo mucho cariño pues crecí con ella y fue mi introducción a los juegos de peleas. Esta entrega no sobresale en ningún aspecto y es muy segura en cuanto a modos de juego. También tiene mecánicas muy interesantes que claramente son precursoras de Tekken 8 (pues fue dirigido por el mismo director Yohei Shimbori) y la verdad expanden muy bien su jugabilidad. Sin embargo, lo más feo es, sin duda, sus personajes "japonizados" que claramente están diseñados para una audiencia específica. Desafortunadamente, DOA se ha vuelto famoso por las razones incorrectas: personajes femeninos sexualizados.

Si bien esta entrega trató de entrar a la industria de los eSports, falló en el intento por querer complacer una audiencia que no es suya y fallarle a la que ya tenía. Yo tengo una debilidad por esta franquicia y no solamente por las waifus. Si puedes sobrevivir todo esto, descubrirás un divertido y casual juego de peleas escondido en el fondo. Si buscas algo más serio y competitivo, quedarás decepcionado.

Compared to DOA5 Last Round, this game is trash! The devs tried so hard to cater this game to the western audience and Esports while keeping the fans which failed drastically. Most outfits are censord, removed before the official release, or didnt make a comeback from its predecessor. You have to grind for hours to get the outfit you want because they now added in-game currency instead of rewarding the player. The Story was uninteresting, forgettable and worse than DOA 5. Overpriced DLCs are everywhere!, Empty Online Multiplayer Mode with no active players, washed out graphics with too much lighting and vibrant colors (If you use ReShade the game will not run), shadows are too dark, bad performance on low-end PCs, Ugly looking female character models. Whenever they fight they always look angry with no additional facial expressions. (some male characters look fine), AI opponents keep special block countering your attacks with no cooldown, Soundtrack is garbage, and the arcade mode feels way TOO Easy and grindy. Becomes boring after a few hours, looks shallow, & unfinished.

All Season Passes have most expensive prices.

DOA7?

On this blessed day I shall bestow upon you the knowledge within the Five Heavenly Tru(thNu)kes.
TRUKE 1: Tomonobu Itagaki is a game design genius.
TRUKE 2: Dead or Alive 5's art style change was an attack on handsome young men (see: Elliot, Ein/Hayate).
TRUKE 3: Devil's Third was a good game.
TRUKE 4: Adding random new meters is the most boring and safe way to "innovate" on a fighting game.
TRUKE 5: DOA6 is worse than DOA5 in every way.
BONUS TRUKE: Modern Team Ninja HATES nunchaku. Notice how the last time we received a (new) nunchaku weapon was Ninja Gaiden 2 (2008), released exclusively for Mircosoft's Xbox 360, and now playable via backwards compatibility on Xbox One and Series consoles. Nioh? Chaku-less. Nioh 2? Chaku-less. Stranger of Kinodise? Chaku-less. Wo Long? Chaku-less. Rise of Ronin? Well nobody played that but I assume it's chaku-less.
Q: What can be derived from these divine insights?
A: DOA6 is an okay game, even a good one if you've never played DOA before. On PC it at least has lobbies and the same stages as consoles, which wasn't true for 5 (which would be very easy to recommend if it weren't for that). If you download DOA6 for free and get a DLC character, you'll probably have a good time. But it's just a very tame entry in a series that used to be bold and innovative. Unfortunately for DOA6, I have no other place to expose modern Team Ninja for their chaku-hating ways. And for that reason, Dead or Alive 6 gets a firm THUMBS DOWN with a badass seal of approval.

I've always been a huge fan of the Dead or Alive fighting game franchise ever since I played DOA 2: Ultimate on the PlayStation 2. In fact, part of my reasoning for buying an Xbox 360 all those years ago was to actually play Dead or Alive 4, which is an Xbox exclusive.

However, my interest in the game started to waiver after Dead or Alive 5: Last Round and was not really reinvigorated with Dead or Alive 6 at all. Koei Tecmo had a really fun fighting game in their previous titles but took that development idea that we commonly see where developers need to try and make each sequel different than the previous game to justify it being something brand new rather than a 'rehash' such as what we see with Call of Duty titles.

This fighting game, while the gameplay is still good, just lacks something charming that the other games had. There's only two new (see: original) characters in this game, which is perhaps what they should have focused on instead of adding the lame "power" bar that we see as a staple for other fighting game franchises, where the bar charges as you deal/receive damage and then you can unleash a flashy sequence of attacks where you briefly lose control of your character as it plays out. This is actually such a problematic feature for the loyal fans of DOA that somebody went through the effort of patching it out with a mod to try and better fix the combat and make it more old-school back when it was perfect. This whole combat idea was to make the game more attractive for eSports but I doubt anybody really plays Dead or Alive competitively anymore, if they ever truly did.

Additionally, Koei Tecmo having the ambition for tournament play also resulted in their mascot, Kasumi, given the "modern design for modern audiences" (AKA woke character redesign) where her default outfits now lack any skin whatsoever . . . an odd choice given that Dead or Alive started as a game in which its best asset was its appealing female characters. Whether Koei Tecmo or the 'wokes' want to accept it or not, that's why we buy and play DOA. Anybody who has played any DOA title in the past knows the secret behind the "age" slider and what it does when you set it to 99. Don't try to make the game more serious and more mature and family-friendly when you have spin-off games that are essentially dating sims where you can watch the female cast sunbathing and playing beach volleyball in skimpy bikinis.

But Koei Tecmo here still understands the philosophy of "sex sells" and that's why they eventually added DLC outfits featuring said skimpy bikinis, maid uniforms, schoolgirl uniforms, etc., anyway. They wanted DOA6 to be a continuation of the 'serious treatment' that DOA5:LR received but perhaps they finally realized that wasn't what people wanted and abruptly changed course to having their roster showing more skin like it was in the past. Of course, you can get most of the DLC outfits (and the crossover characters featuring the likes of Mai Shiranui) through four overpriced season passes. In total, buying all of the DLC nets you an extra $250 USD or so on top of the game already costing $60 USD for the base game still. Because while you CAN play it for free, you get access to only four characters in a roster of about 31 characters split between 11 male characters and 20 female characters. A handful of those female characters are DLC, by the way, so the base game has less than 31 characters. Resourceful people can easily find a way to just unlock DLC for free, which I'd recommend instead of supporting a company that has become very greedy after Dead or Alive 4.

Dead or Alive 6 also has character customization, but not to the extensive degree that we'd find in newer Soul Calibur titles. It's mostly just changing hairstyle from long to a ponytail or vice versa, or adding accessories like sunglasses. It's actually rather grindy here, as in order to unlock many of the other outfits that come with the base game, you have to collect coins and "outfit pieces." You need these outfit pieces to first unlock the other outfits, and then you use gold to purchase them to have it available in the character selection screen. To unlock everything, you need well over 200k coins, and honestly, I just used a trainer to give myself infinite gold coins for the sake of just skipping the grind. As per usual, the male characters lack any character customization options whatsoever. While I can understand why that is, the female characters are who people like to look at the most, plenty of us (myself included) are experienced with the male characters and I feel like giving them some extra love isn't too much to ask for given it's kind of the jobs of the developers to do that. There's always been this huge disparity in attention that female characters receive compared to their male counterparts. It'd be critiqued as sexism if male characters were given more attention than female characters.

For people playing it offline, you have the basic campaign which ties up a rather convoluted and contrived plot that you honestly have to go to YouTube to really even fully understand, and you have the usual game modes like practice mode for your combo practicing, versus mode, time attack, and survival mode. DOA6 doesn't include tag matches where you could play as 2 characters versus another 2 characters and see some unique introductions and win poses for characters that have relationships to one another. Fighting results in characters becoming visibly sweaty and dirty and even forming bruises, which is either acceptable or not depending on your interests, and of course the fighting is very smooth and fluid as you'd expect from 6+ installments in this franchise. The animations are great and most of the female characters are still hot so long as you invest/obtain the DLC.

Of course, the main reason to buying these fighting games is for the online play. But most people tend to agree that Dead or Alive 5: Last Round has the better combat system and so they prefer to play that one. There's still a community here but I don't really recommend this game for it.

awesome game! always great!

Still no intro, no Gen Fu, no Tomonobu Itagaki

This game got the worst break, and it makes me sad. Forsaken by the fans, who embroiled in a culture war hallucination at launch, engaged more meaningfully with a JP only Gacha spinoff. Forgotten by designers who left us with nought but a sparse library of costumes (obviously just for the girls) that either cost way too much in-game currency or way too much out-of-game honest-to-god real currency. The game's monetization and unlock pacing is frankly predatory and should be avoided and circumvented by any means necessary. While forward-thinking in some ways, its attempt to lower the cost of entry with a by-character model was half-baked and did not succeed. Dead Or Alive perished with Soul Calibur in the Late 2010s 3D Fighter Incident.

Blatant sexualization is pretty awkward, (Marie Rose especially, do not @ me) and even more so due to the recency and high definition of the game. Likewise, the halfhearted attempts to clean up the game's image left some obvious omissions, like the stupid cut-out hole that appears after heavy attacks on some costumes as a non-committal pass at clothing destruction.

What's funny is, they didn't need it. All the characters look gorgeous (better than ever, even!) and the animations, costumes, and even the goofy cinematics frequently endear me to them in surprising ways. There's plenty of potential here - While DOA6 has some involved combos, the core mechanics are simple without being braindead and uniquely grapple-focused and grounded, standing out against its flashy contemporary lunch-eater Tekken. The characters and story are... vapid yes, but expressive, charming and above all, glamorous.

Though they attempted to "tone it down", I think a better approach would have been to focus on broadening and universalizing the horniness and camp, especially since what's here is generally really good. Although underdeveloped, even the guys have a softness to them that deserved to be explored further, but is harshly limited by the overwhelming conservative male-gaziness of the game. If they ever bring this franchise back they should just make it full bimbo. Give all the dudes sexy costumes too, and add a mode where we can organize sleepovers and play board games with the characters or something. Gamers are still down bad, you just have to humanize it a little.

Despite it all, I still stan this bimbo fighter. Despite the poor timing and muddled intentions, what's here is undeniably high quality and it truly deserved better.

Cool

This game is the best fighting game to ever exist, hands down, don't care what anybody else says. Better than Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and any other fighting game. This game took 3D fighting, and for decades, did it the best.

fun

Nice & competitive

If you’ve ever wanted to combine your love for fighting games with a workout routine, Dead or Alive 6 is your ticket to fitness glory. This game is like a high-octane aerobics class where the instructors are ninjas, wrestlers, and, for some reason, a guy who looks like he wandered in from a beach volleyball tournament.

Graphics and Characters: The visuals are stunning, and the characters are so lifelike that you might find yourself apologizing to your TV after landing a particularly brutal combo. The costumes range from “practical for combat” to “did they just come from a cosplay convention?” But hey, who am I to judge a ninja’s fashion choices?

Gameplay: The combat system is a delightful mix of strategy and sheer panic. You’ll start with the best intentions, planning your moves like a chess grandmaster. Five seconds in, you’re button-mashing like your life depends on it, praying for a miracle. And sometimes, just sometimes, you’ll pull off a move so spectacular that you’ll consider a career in professional gaming.

Story Mode: The story mode is a wild ride. It’s like watching a soap opera where every disagreement is settled with a roundhouse kick. The plot twists are as frequent as the punches, and just as surprising. One moment you’re saving the world, the next you’re fighting a genetically engineered clone. It’s bonkers, but in the best way possible.

Online Play: Playing online is where the real fun begins. You’ll encounter players who have clearly spent more time practicing than sleeping. But don’t worry, losing repeatedly builds character. And who knows, you might even win a match or two. Just remember to stretch those fingers beforehand.

Final Thoughts: Dead or Alive 6 is a rollercoaster of fun, frustration, and fabulous outfits. It’s perfect for those who love a good fight and don’t mind a bit of chaos. Just be prepared for your thumbs to get a serious workout. And maybe keep some ice packs handy.

I love this game and the mods for it are awesome. Highly recommended.

It has always been a legendary game for me.

Dead or Alive 7 when?