It's fine. With DLC, it has a roster of 51 characters. They're interesting and balanced. Game feels good to play. Tons of cosmetics. It was the big 3D fighter of its era.
Why don't I recommend it?
... This game has no soul.
The two strongest characters in the roster, Akuma and Geese Howard, are not from the Tekken franchise. One of them, Akuma, is canonically added to the game's world via a bizarre story mode inclusion. He's pretty much the center of the game, and he's not even from the Tekken franchise. Did I mention the game includes a story mode? And it's very bad?
Fighting games having a terrible story is a longstanding tradition. But ye olden fighting game stories were silly, melodramatic, relegated to cutscenes that were closer to fun easter eggs, a nice reward for completing the game that provided a silly structure to justify your character's existence and participation in the King of the Iron Fist Tournment. They added flavor and fun, and held attention without overstaying their welcome.
But this story, which is all about a big war between the Mishimas, takes itself so seriously. It's very cinematic, with stylish cutscenes and a dark animated voiceover where a journalist talks about how sad he is that his whole family was killed by a war... It's not at all interesting. The goofy side stories, which were always more of a draw for me, are relegated to single fight side-chapters. They are short, dull, and not nearly goofy enough compared with pre-Tekken-6 entries in the series.
Worse... DLC characters just don't get story chapters at all. Why is this a problem when the story isn't the draw of fighting games? Well, the normal mode of adding new characters to a series roster is to come up with a concept (i.e. "Marshall Law is gonna be like Bruce Lee" "We need a Muay Thai guy" "How about representation from Brazil?" etc.), make a design from that concept that looks cool, and then write in a story to give that character motivation and attract players. This time, they just skipped that last step of including a story for most of the new characters. And the ones they do include a story for, like Shaheen or Josie, are so generic and underwhelming that you almost wish they hadn't included the story at all.
This matters in a game that has 51 characters to choose from. That's a lot. If you don't give the newer characters something interesting about them for players to hold on to, they just become noise. Little wonder many didn't return for Tekken 8 (goodbye, Josie!)
Thanks to the inclusion of this awful story mode, the classic Arcade mode in Tekken 7 is completely neglected. It's only 5 fights long, and sometimes Akuma is the final boss. That's right: The biggest baddest final boss is a character from a different franchise. And you don't get character endings for beating Arcade mode, you just get a "you win" message and it's over. It's dull, vestigial, included out of habit in a perfunctory manner, like Namco was hoping you'd never click it. And they'd be right.
Make no mistake, this is a proficient 3D fighting game, the highest quality of its era, obsessively balanced, tight controls, fun to play, no issues running on my PC. But that's all they focussed on. Huge roster, tight gameplay, an ocean of unlockable cosmetics... But no heart.
Tekken 8 looks like it has more love put into it. There's no reason to stop here, just go try that one out.
