Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus

Haven't impressed your friends with the Xbox's graphical might lately? Pop in a copy of Tao Feng. It's a beautiful game. Superbly detailed characters and environments, gorgeous animation and movement. It will not disappoint on the visuals front with a smokin' framerate, and extra heave in the heaving bosoms of the female fighters. Character design might be a little unusual--there's a guy who looks like a freakin' insect--but they all look sooo good.

And once I turned down the music, I discovered there were some pretty good sounds too. In a nice touch, the character's voices echo if they're in a large chamber, as opposed to outdoors. There are also some great environmental sounds, such as the shipwreck's creaking.

So it looks and sounds good, but how does it play? Pretty well. The game's default setting has no rounds, instead you must concentrate on beating your opponent down to the last drop of each of his or her three health bars. Button mashing might win you the first couple of fights, but the game comes down to timing and combos. You'll love this game if combos are your thing. Timing combos is a somewhat delicate operation, but essential to mastering the game. If you can unleash a string of five or six hits on someone, you'll spin them across the board. You also need to practice blocking or dodging combos, because once you get locked in one, ouch. In theory it is possible to interrupt a combo and counter-attack, but in practice I found it very difficult. I also had a little trouble getting the blocking done right. Other than that, control is tight.

Your basic attacks consist of a quick lead kick and lead punch, and a slower trailing kick and trailing punch. The pad controls your movement; pushing up will have your character jump, down will crouch, and pulling left will block. As usual, different combinations of the buttons will do different attacks and combos, and everything is represented--charging, grabs and throws, alternate stances, and striking at those who are prone. The white button will launch a special Chi attack, and black taunts your foe. Chi is gained by landing attacks and taunting. The triggers are also used in an interesting way, which makes it much more than a DOA-wanna-be. More on that in a second.

Occasionally I found it much easier to evade incoming attacks by weaving up and down. It's one of Tao Feng's more exciting points that you can move in any direction around the arenas, and what's more, there are objects in them that you can knock your opponents into, or do moves off of. Use the D-pad to indicate the direction of an object and the right trigger, and you can do things like spin-kick off poles, or jump off walls, which is useful for both attacking and getting out of a corner. Even more fun: you can trash the environments pretty well, chipping the floor as you slam someone down, punching them through glass, wood, or kicking them into a machine and watching it spark and explode. My favorite one is on a rooftop level, where you knock your opponent into a cage of pigeons, who scatter. This is a great addition to the fighting genre, and makes you feel like you're causing major chaos when you rumble. The designers also made sure to place you in environments where there would be lots of things to break, like an office lobby, and arcade (I want to play the game "Women's Gymnastics Trivia"), even a museum. The background animation in these environments does even more to bring them to life--in a few levels I would back my character up trying to get a look at what was happening on a particular monitor.

As fights progress characters reflect battle damage, so by the end of a fight clothes are torn, eyes are black, and lips and limbs are bloody. And damage is not only a chance to show off the pretty graphics even further, the game has limb damage, another interesting addition to the genre. Arms and legs, should they take enough hits or be used to block, may become injured. You will see the fighter's stance change, and attacks with that limb will be weaker. It's a great idea I hope to see go further in subsequent games. Limb damage can be healed if you have a full Chi meter.

All of this adds up to a solid fighting game, worth at least a rental. There are a few problems--again I wish blocking was a little easier, especially since it's required a lot against the tougher characters. Also disappointing is that you can't use your own custom Xbox soundtrack, and Xbox Live. I want to see a fighting game go online, but if that's too much to ask, how about downloadable new content, such as new characters and costumes?

Tao Feng's modes are pretty standard, which is a touch disappointing after all these new additions to the matches themselves. Versus, Team Battle, Survival, Tournament, and Quest. Quest mode is the game's story mode, where your fighter battles to recover pieces from an artifact. The characters are divided into two clans, Pale Lotus and Black Mantis. Choose to play as a character from one clan, and you fight members of the other. You have the option to make games round-based, and you can also give a player a health handicap, if you think they're gonna kick your ass. That's a very useful feature when you go against the fighting game master in your household and want to stand a chance.

Tao Feng is a very good beat-'em up from Studio Gigante, which was founded by a number of ex-Midway Mortal Kombat employees. There are some who believe that Mortal Kombat's only real contribution to the fighting genre was gratuitous gore, but Tao Feng shows its developers understand and love fighting games, and have good ideas for making them better. Many of those ideas obviously got into Tao Feng.

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