Dead or Alive 6 Last Round Review

Dead or Alive 6 Last Round also feels absurdly good to play on PC. Hits carry weight and impact, characters feel agile, and matches are quick and engaging. You can pull off some truly sick combos if you know how, but matches still revolve around risk-reward decision making and execution. I’m also still a big fan of the Danger Zones, which range from overtly silly things like “you got blasted into a pterodactyl egg and now the pterodactyls are Big Mad at you” to “it’s funny when someone falls down a really big hill and hits everything along the way.” Positioning, poise, and proper timing are elements of any fighting game, but it’s hard to overstate how simple and clean and good Dead or Alive’s moment-to-moment game feel is. Everything just flows.

As someone who played a lot around the original’s release in 2019 but didn’t keep up with every update since, one of the benefits of Last Round is getting to use the five included DLC characters I hadn’t tried out. I enjoyed them all, but really clicked with Momiji, Rachel, and Phase 4. Momiji trades power for speed and aggression, while Rachel is all brute strength through short strings that turn into lots of damage, which tracks if you’ve played as either of them in Ninja Gaiden. Phase 4, well… she can do a little bit of everything – one of those “feels immediately good to play” kind of characters, at least for me. I definitely want to spend more time with her.

What’s Old is New Again

Dead or Alive 6 is otherwise the same game I remember – and though that’s disappointing for a $40 re-release, it’s mostly a good thing when it comes to the actual game stuff. It still has excellent teaching tools, including an incredibly detailed tutorial, command training, your standard training mode (complete with frame data), and combo trials for each character. If this is your first Dead or Alive, it’s easy to find your footing, and if you’re knocking off some rust, these things still help a lot.

I’m also a big fan of DOA Quest, a challenge mode that puts you into a fight and gives you up to three tasks to complete, like doing X amount of damage in a combo or hitting an enemy while they’re sidestepping. The best part is that if you don’t know how to do something, you can press a button and be immediately taken to the appropriate lesson in the tutorial, practice to your heart’s content, and then go back to DOA Quest when you’re done. Incredible. Fighting games are hard to learn and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, so good teaching tools are essential to getting people in and keeping them around. DOA6 may be seven years old, but it got this stuff right, and that’s a big deal.

The other single-player modes are good, too. Say what you will, but I like the enjoyably silly if disjointed story mode. Sure, it’s about tournaments and evil corporations and global conspiracies and ninjas and cyborgs and all sorts of crazy stuff, but it’s also very endearing. Where else can you see a guy yell “Hey, ninja man!” at an actual ninja before throwing a steel drum at him and immediately thereafter watch two women bond over their love of fighting, and then watch a couple of kids cheer on a New York street fighter after a sparring match? Not many places, and I would much rather play through this than something like Street Fighter 6’s World Tour, or just watch a movie like in Guilty Gear Strive.

It’s also nice to see a fighting game campaign that puts women in its lead roles instead of relegating them to supporting parts like most others do. The boys play their parts and get their moments, but this show mostly belongs to Kasumi, Helena, Ayane, Honaka, Laifeng, and Hitomi. They make choices, have agency, and solve their own problems in a way people who have only ever seen them playing beach volleyball might not expect. And sure, the story is a little Looney Tunes, but every fighting game’s is. Ever paid attention to Street Fighter lore? There’s a guy who thinks he’s a car, and that might not even be the weirdest part of it. Dead or Alive even makes a hell of a lot more sense than something like Mortal Kombat (and I say this as someone who likes MK’s nonsense), and while the overarching plot can be messy, the individual scenes and character interactions work well and are a lot of fun.

Of course, that’s not the reputation Dead or Alive is typically known for, and because one of the selling points of Last Round is new costumes and a Photo Mode, I suppose I now have to talk about the thing that consumes every piece of criticism ever written about this series: how everyone looks and moves. Yes, the women look Like That™. Yes, many of them are very bouncy. Yes, you can change their hairstyles, give them glasses, and even dress them in revealing outfits if you’re into that (though you’ll still need to pay extra for the truly egregious stuff). Personally, I’m here for the punching.

If we’re being honest, there is no shortage of sexy characters in fighting games; Soul Calibur’s Ivy is quite literally a dominatrix and Capcom’s sexy outfits for Chun-Li sell so well that the last couple Street Fighters made the GDP of a small country. If anything, fighting games have only gotten hornier as time has gone on. I mean, have you seen the Guilty Gear cast? Or Street Fighter’s Juri, who is now Foot Fetish: The Character? Compared to some of that stuff, Dead or Alive 6’s brand of horny feels kind of… quaint? Some of the outfits here are tacky or tasteless, yeah, but I also don’t have to purchase or use them, or let them define my entire perception of Last Round. And if someone does use one of the ones I dislike online? All the more reason to kick their ass.

In fact, many of the visual improvements that were dismissed in 2019 as Team Ninja “being weird” actually hold up quite well. It rules that characters sweat during combat and you can see cuts and bruises on their faces and bodies when they’re doing their win poses. You should be a little sweaty and beat up after a fight, and it doesn’t feel like those details have been added with purely exploitative, leering intentions. Fighting is a brutal, bloody business. I like that Dead or Alive 6’s characters look like they’ve been in a brawl after a knock down, drag out fight. Don’t get me wrong: you’d never mistake Dead or Alive 6 for a fighter made today. It looks like a very pretty PS4 game, which it functionally is, but it at least holds up really well.

So yeah, Dead or Alive is still Dead or Alive, but you have to take the good with the bad, and there is certainly good here. Even with the DLC issues, I’d kill to have this many costume options in most modern fighters, and it’s nice that you can unlock so many of them just by playing as characters and spending in-game cash. Some of them are tacky, but I’d rather put Helena into one of her many fabulous dresses than a swimsuit anyway. There’s also an impressive visual variety across everyone’s designs, especially in an age when we’re seeing a lot of the same face shapes and body types be recycled. I want to be clear: I’m not saying Dead or Alive 6 is immune to criticism. Some of it is absolutely deserved; but spending time with it after a few years away also makes me think there’s stuff here that deserves more praise than we previously gave it credit for. I hope we can be normal about that.

Rollback Netcode, My Beloved

As for other single-player modes, well, there’s no shortage. The lack of Tag Battle in this release is lousy, but there’s still plenty to do, like standard versus, arcade, and survival modes, a replay theater, a library with lore entries and trivia, and a music room (in addition to the aforementioned story mode and DOA Quest). Even if you never want to play online, there’s lots here to occupy you.

I even like the new Photo Mode (despite the fact that it will inevitably be used for evil). It’s easy to pick your characters and stage and go through their move list frame by frame in order to get the shots you want. I wish there was more freedom when it came to moving the camera; it’s largely locked in place, though you can zoom in and out and rotate the characters to compensate. Photo Mode also doesn’t work quite as well on a fightstick as I’d like because some options are mapped to the right analog stick, but it’s solid enough.

Finally, let’s talk about online play. The lack of cross-platform play in 2026 is completely inexcusable, but the lack of rollback, while equally maddening, is easier to understand because it’s famously difficult to implement in 3D games. That said, Last Round’s netcode worked surprisingly well when I tested it. I live in New York and played someone in Texas and our matches were, aside from one minor instance of stuttering, incredibly smooth. However, we were both on wired connections. Now, I’m of the opinion that people who play fighting games on wireless connections are ninja dogs who will never see heaven, but the fact remains that a lot of people play that way and it’s going to impact matches. It’s wild that Team Ninja had the opportunity to implement a rollback solution here (which they could have then refined in future games) and simply chose not to. Is it gamebreaking? No. But it’s an incredibly disappointing choice.