I finally decided that perhaps Microsoft realized Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus was going to come out in a few short weeks, so they just needed to clear some room for what sounded like a blockbuster Xbox fighter. Having now played Tao Feng, I can say with confidence that this third thought was completely off-base. Tao Feng provides little reason to pull another fighting game from the shelf. Unless it’s your own shelf at home, that is, and you’re pulling down a previous fighter to reinstate your faith in the fighting genre.

Part of what was so intriguing about Tao Feng is the fact that John Tobias, the co-creator of Mortal Kombat, was the driving force behind the new Xbox fighter. With a heritage like that, you’d expect some innovative gameplay aspects that not only affect how you play the game, but also how much you enjoy it. In both practice and theory, Tao Feng delivers on that assumption.

Tao Feng includes a new facet to the fighting genre in which limbs actually take damage, which then affects a character’s performance. Repeatedly take shots to the arm, for example, and you’ll first get a Limb Damage Alert, followed by a Limb Damage Warning, followed ultimately by a broken bone or equally painful boo-boo. The result of this damage is almost always a 50-percent reduction in the strength of your punches. The same holds true with leg damage; take enough hits, and your kicks will lose half their power.

Almost miraculously, if you damage a limb beyond repair, you can still heal yourself using Chi, a special "life force" that can be used to either mend your body or unleash one of three special attacks. Building up Chi is relatively simple: dealing blows upon your opponent fills your Chi meter, and stringing together combos and using the environment to your advantage (swinging off of poles) will accumulate Chi even faster. Naturally, you can accumulate Chi repeatedly in a match, as long as you can keep bruising your opponent.

And yes, your foes will bruise. Tao Feng, like the Mortal Kombat series before it, does not tread lightly on gore. Rather than fatalities and bloody spikes, though, Tao Feng shows character damage in "real time," with bruises, scratches, torn clothing and bloody limbs all appearing between rounds. In theory, this is supposed to help you feel more entrenched in the urban gang fighting between the Pale Lotus and Black Mantis.

Unfortunately, though, it really is just in theory. The damage system, to put it bluntly, is flawed. Not in the sense that it doesn’t affect how you play; you actually do notice when your opponents’ punches (or your own) are only connecting with half of their normal oomph. The flaws come into play when the damage is actually being dealt.

The A.I. in Tao Feng is rather brutal, particularly in the later matches, and fighting too aggressively yourself will more often than not leave you bloody on the ground and crying for your ba-ba. As a result, you’ll find yourself making generous use of defensive motions and blocking to no end. Problem is, blocking too often makes you more susceptible to limb damage, which forces you into playing somewhat aggressively if you want to be on the giving, rather than receiving end of the pain. This essentially puts you in a gameplay Catch-22: you need to block to survive, but blocking makes your limbs break, which in turn means you can’t survive for too long. Hope you like having the cards stacked against you.

Controlling your character throughout these "rigged" matches is very old-school fare. For starters, you move using the D-pad, and blocking is accomplished by pressing the D-pad away from your opponent (similar to the old Street Fighter games). Rather than high and low punches and kicks, each character has trailing and leading punches and kicks. As you’d expect, these are different in both power and speed, which therefore makes them more or less effective in counter blows and tight spots. Combos are also in full force, with each character having 100-plus unique moves. Your timing has to be absolutely perfect, though, to get the six-button combos to work. And nine times out of 10, regardless of your fighting prowess or double-jointedness, your timing will be wrong.

Speaking of wrong, why do publishers insist on putting a plot in their fighting games? People go to see action movies for the explosion, not the exposition, and the same thing is generally true with fighting fans. The story of Tao Feng: You’re in a gang. You’re trying to gain control of a tablet to bargain with the gods for immortality. A rival gang has the tablet, so you beat them up. The End.

Sounds like standard fare for a fighter, but for some reason, the narrator consistently beats this plot into your head between matches, and you can’t skip past his clichéd speeches. If Studio Gigante wanted gamers to feel more immersed in the game’s plot, an opening full-motion video or even small videos between opponents could have helped flesh it out a bit. Alas, there are none to be found in Tao Feng, which leaves you completely detached from the game or its story.

For a game touting a real-time damage system, it should come as no surprise that the wounds, scratches, bruises and torn clothing all look incredible. The particle effects that come with special moves are also quite impressive, as are individual character models, which are deliciously smooth and detailed. The models are also varied enough that you seldom feel as though you’re playing the same character with a different skin. It’s a pleasant surprise for a fighter, and one that I welcomed with open arms.

The animations of those characters, though, leave much to be desired. Individual poses and punching/kicking motions are impressive on their own, but moving from one animation to the next is a spotty affair at best. The fluidity you’d like to see is just strangely missing. It’s actually somewhat reminiscent of the first Mortal Kombat in the arcade, where damaging uppercuts transitioned into quick jabs about as smoothly as 10-grade sandpaper. Of course, that game debuted years ago, and you’d like to think we’d moved beyond poor animation transitions.

Perhaps the most disappointing graphical aspect, though, is the inconsistent framerate. Time and again the game chops up frames like Yan dicing celery. At times this has a similar effect on the outcome, as well, with your character being sliced by computer-controlled opponents that seem unfazed by frames dropping by the wayside. Given that the game suffers from little or no clipping, it’s truly a shame to see this technical snafu pop up so frequently.

If Tao Feng makes one final attempt to redeem itself in the graphics department, it’s the highly detailed environments. Where surroundings are concerned, Tao Feng easily rivals DOA3, the fighter of Xbox-launch fame. From environmental destruction to textured everything, the locales in Tao Feng look top-notch. They’re not as multi-tiered as DOA3’s, and you can’t explore them as easily either, but the quality of what’s there is simply great.

Yuck. I’d like to end this section with that one word, but that would leave you wondering why. Let me explain, then, the painful audio of Tao Feng: Two actors grunting into an empty soup can, with you as a flea sitting in the bottom. The tinny echo that would reverberate around your head pretty much sums up the sounds you’ll hear most often. I didn’t believe other reviewers’ comments until I played the game myself. Seriously, Tao Feng sounds like it was recorded in a corrugated metal shed.

As for the narrator who tries to piece-meal together a story, he bears a striking audio resemblance to The Sphinx from the movie "Mystery Men." Honestly, what’s the point of a narrator who sums up every one of your losses with the sentence "You must continue, or our journey together has ended"? And no, the comments don’t get any better or less inane.

Each character in Tao Feng has his or her own Quest mode, which in most other games is referred to as "Arcade" or "Story" mode. Progressing through each Quest is a matter of selecting which player you want to be, choosing which opponent (of six) you want to take on next, and having your progress automatically saved between foes. This is a pretty nice feature in that you can play one character to the point of frustration, skip to another character or two and return later with your progress intact.

Unfortunately, though, this is yet another instance where a Tao Feng feature is appreciated as much for its innovation as it is for its convenience. Why? Because with the auto-save options, you can walk away from the game after three or four frustrating matches and resume play once you’ve cooled down. It’s innovative, sure, but the innovation is mostly appreciated because the gameplay can be so frustrating.

The game’s replayability increases slightly when you consider the Versus mode, but even then, you still have to account for the framerate and other problems. Really, there’s very little to keep the average gamer from playing Tao Feng for more than a dozen hours.

I wanted to like this game. I wanted to love this game. I wanted to raise this game to the heavens and proclaim that John Tobias had created yet another astounding fighter. Now I just want those hours of my life back. Tao Feng has some fantastic concepts in its real-time damage system and the influence limb damage has on actual gameplay. It’s just that those concepts don’t congeal to form a good game.

As much as I doubt most gamers will truly enjoy Tao Feng, I simultaneously hope enough people buy it that Microsoft and Studio Gigante see fit to create a sequel. I have no doubt that a sequel could improve upon most of the gameplay and other problems plaguing this first outing. Until that time, though, you’re better off avoiding this game entirely.

See more screens on the Tao Feng media page