Dead or Alive 6: Last Round launches with $1,700 in DLC and 79% negative Steam reviews

Full text

Dead or Alive is staging a comeback for the 30th anniversary of the fighting series, but judging by the response from players, the first stage of that return is dead on arrival. Dead or Alive 6: Last Round just launched with $1,700 worth of DLC and very few of the features fighting game fans have come to expect from the genre, and it's taking an absolute drubbing in the Steam reviews.Dead or Alive 6 originally launched in 2019, and the new Last Round version is billed as the "definitive" edition of the game. It features a photo mode, new costumes, and… well, that's about it. It's otherwise identical to the original, right down to the lack of crossplay or rollback netcode – absences that were odd in 2019, and darn near unforgivable for fighting fans here in 2026.Last Round will soon get new updates and DLC characters, offering a bit of new life to the original game, but even that's got caveats to annoy existing players. The previous version has been delisted, and there's no upgrade path to Last Round, which means that players who bought the old game will have to spend $40 for the privilege of paying to access the next round of DLC.At least old DLC purchases transfer to the new game, but new players are going to have a major case of sticker shock when they see that Last Round is launching with 440 pieces of DLC which, according to IsThereAnyDeal, totals out to $1,707.60.That total is a little unfair to Dead or Alive 6, since it includes both standalone costumes and bundle sets, as well as character unlocks for the free-to-play version of the game, but it's still downright galling to see all this years-old content being sold at its original price. In fact, the character unlocks have actually doubled in price – characters that once cost $4 apiece are now $8 each.With all those factors in mind, you can probably start to see why the game's 709 Steam reviews are 79% negative. "im usually pretty resilient to koei tecmo greed but this is too far," as the top review puts it. "$40. No new content, just the privilege of being able to spend more money on unrevealed DLC later," another goes.Dead or Alive 6 is an entertaining fighting game – but like every entry in the series since 5, it's also a vehicle to sell endless arrays of costumes for players trapped in their thirst for the series' cast of anime hotties. If there was any hope that Koei Tecmo would pull back on its aggressive DLC practices with a brand-new series entry on the way, I'm not sure how that hope is going to survive Last Round's launch.These are the best fighting games you can play today.