Tekken 7 runs great on PC, and online matchmaking has been excellent so far

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Just don't try to navigate its menus with your keyboard.

The legendary arcade quarter-eater Tekken has come to PC for the first time with Tekken 7, which is out on Steam as of yesterday. We’ll have a full review up next week, but we couldn’t let you go into the weekend without taking a first look at the PC version's performance.

In short: it’s rad like a cage-fighting panda bear. I was pleased to see Tekken 7 running at 60 fps (which it's locked to) at 1920x1080 on Ultra settings on my GTX 970. It includes a good set of standard graphics settings, as well as little extras such as an FPS counter. And there’s a huge gulf between Ultra and Low graphics options, which means that players on lower-end systems can probably still run Tekken quite well if they’re willing to give up some of the flash.

Tekken 7 completely lacks any kind of mouse support. This is really common with these kinds of ports, but that doesn’t make it any less baffling. Navigating menus is frustrating and tedious using keyboard hotkeys—all the more so because hotkey reminders and helpful prompts reference controller button configurations. During one early practice match I had to quit all the way out to the main menu just to look up a key binding (it was V for some reason).

But let’s be real: if you’re bringing a keyboard to a Tekken fight, you’re not really taking this thing seriously. I had no issues switching between my keyboard and my controller (fight sticks also work), and the controller experience was immediately much better.

On the evening of launch, the matchmaking servers were chock-full of players. I never had to wait longer than 15 seconds or so before I found a match. In terms of time from start of matchmaking to the first punch thrown, Tekken clocks in around the same as Rocket League. Not instant, but not a slog, either. 

Most of the games I played had great connections with no noticeable lag. Two of the games, though, appeared to have some connection hiccups. Even though lag spikes are a bummer, Tekken does a great job of recognizing and adjusting for them: the game seems to pause for both players for a half-second or so, then resume once the connection stabilizes. In one game, this happened often enough to be annoying, but neither player got a competitive advantage from lag.

Some Steam users are reporting a problem loading the game—an error tracing back to a problem with the C++ executable—but it doesn’t seem to be widespread and a quick update appears to solve it. Other than that, I haven't seen the forums rioting over any one big error, so I think that counts as a win.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Tekken’s large file size. System requirements warn players to have at least 60GB set aside, and my install size clocked in at just over 57GB. This isn’t exactly a performance issue, but it may be a problem for people perpetually battling full hard drives. You’re going to have to clean house to free up some space for this one.

Look for PC Gamer's full review of Tekken 7 next week.