If it's at all possible, fighting game fans are even more fickle and picky about their games than racing game fans. Browsing through the forums here it's pretty obvious that when discussing fighters, loyalties can run pretty deep and fans either swear by Mortal Kombat, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive or Tekken (being the 4 most popular franchises). So when a new entry to the genre comes along it's always met with an air of skepticism and sometimes even a small amount of mistrust.

Tao Feng : Fist of the Lotus (from now on TF) is bought to us by John Tobias, one of the original creators of Mortal Kombat and while it shares some things in common such as drawing on Chinese Mythology in the story line it differs in that, while violent, is surprisingly blood free and pits two Sects against each other, The Pale Lotus and The Black Mantis, of which the characters in the game each belong to one of. These two sects have battled for centuries over two tablets that contain riddles revealing the locations of the treasures of the Pale Lotus temple. Pale Lotus posses the Yang tablet but the Yin tablet was stolen by force and is now controlled by the Black Mantis sect. According to legend the treasures of the Pale Lotus temple may be used to bargain with the gods for immortality. It's these treasures that each sect seeks, the Pale Lotus hope to gain immortality to defend truth and harmony while the Black Mantis serve a much darker purpose.

Xbox owners were pretty starved of quality fighters for a while with only DOA3 being the one worth owning for quite a long time. Mortal Kombat : Deadly Alliance kept our blood lust satisfied so how does TF shape up?

It's obvious from your first fight in TF that John Tobias is trying to bring something new to fighting games, create a new franchise and leave his mark on the genre that he helped create. No more will we ever be satisfied with dull, boring arenas. No more will be put up with cross platform quality graphics. Tao Feng grabs mediocrity by the neck and kills it off with a loud, satisfying snap! Even the traditional 'best of 3 rounds' system has been changed to a new 'Health' system (but can be turned on in the game options for the purists).

TF has certainly received quite a few mixed reviews. Many magazines and websites have loved it but with an average score of under %70 at gamerankings.com even I was a bit skeptical about how it had turned out. I got to play a build of it at the Xbox birthday bash earlier this year, but the combination of sleep deprivation and alcohol didn't really allow me to remember much about it at all. Well, I've been playing TF almost non stop since it arrived and while there are definitely some issues with the game, some minor and some major problems, I'm absolutely loving it.

Firstly it must be said that TF is the best looking fighting game on the Xbox so far, even surpassing Dead or Alive 3. The characters look absolutely incredible, and apart from some downright silly names (how can 'fiery phoenix' instill fear in anyone?) are generally likeable, each with their own moves and attacks. Sporting all sorts of reflections, bump mapping and fantastic levels of detail, all the characters look fantastic. Watch them closely during a fight as the amount of damage that they take starts to show. Their clothing tears, they bruise, get black eyes and even suffer limb damage if they take too many blows to the arms or the legs. This isn't just a visual thing either as if your character suffers limb damage, their blows from the damaged limbs do %50 less damage and if it's your arms that suffer damage, your character will hold them, it's a nice touch but probably doesn't really make as much impact on the outcome as it should as the A.I has still beaten the crud out of me, even with damaged limbs.

They can be healed though as during the fight as the blows that you land fill up your 'Chi meter' and once this is full you can launch a devastating 'Chi' attack or heal yourself if you have suffered limb damage. It's a great attempt at creating some tactical situations in the game and it works pretty well. Do I launch a 'Chi attack' to try and finish my opponent off, but risk having it blocked and wasting it, or do I hang onto it to heal myself if I get hurt?

Naturally when fighting, it has to take place somewhere and TF sports a number of different levels ranging from a timber ship, a museum, a city street under an overhead train, a city rooftop in the rain as well as a marina and some other equally impressive levels. The best thing about the levels is that most of them are fairly large and contain plenty of breakable objects to slam your opponent through. The Museum, for example, contains glass cabinets along the walls that are all breakable. The arcade has pinball and arcade machines that explode when you slam people into them and the floors and walls break when you throw or slam your opponents into them. I won't give away too much as playing in each level and watching the damage that you can cause is one of the highlights in TF. A few great features are that in every level there are usually a few poles or items that you can use to launch attacks off. Move into the object while quickly pressing the right trigger to launch a pole attack. Your character grabs the pole, swings around and launches themselves at your opponent, hopefully causing plenty of damage and catching them totally off guard. If you find yourself getting cornered, press back and again, press the right trigger and you can launch an attack of the wall behind you! Small touches like this are pulled off effortlessly with practice and really help to give TF a couple of truly unique features.

The fighting is combo based and pretty deep once you get a bit of practice in. While the counters and grapples aren't as fluid as DOA3 or even good old Virtua Fighter, the fights are fast, painful looking and plenty of fun but it would have been good to see reversals, blocking handled a touch better and more throw moves to help create some more variety. Also unfortunately most of the longer combo moves are very hard to remember making their usefulness somewhat limited. Another gripe is that similar moves, such as ground attack, are accessed by a different button depending on the character and some consistency with this would have been appreciated as we have enough to remember right? Without having to remember which character uses down and X and which characters use down and B for ground attacks would have been nice. Also why is 'stance change' accessed by a button combo? In MK:DA it's a single button press and much easier to remember and therefore, use. Doing the training and learning these combos is pretty important as during the games 'quest mode' you will get absolutely whipped by the A.I, even on the easier settings.

One last complaint I must mention is that TF has no pure 'arcade mode' to pit you against the characters one after the other and an end boss. The gameplay modes are 'Versus' which lets you go one on one with a human or A.I opponent, 'Quest' which is the story mode of the game. Choose a sect and try to recover sacred treasures. 'Survival' mode is where you aim to stay alive as long as possible by facing one A.I opponent after another. 'Team Battle' lets one or two players select up to 6 different characters and the order in which they will fight, the team that runs out of characters first loses and each character only has one health meter.

There is also 'Tournament' mode. You can select 4-8 players that are randomly paired off in head to head fights. The winner of each fight collects the points for their match as well as points from the opponent's previous battles. The final tournament winner gets the points of all the matches combined. Lastly there is the normal training mode where you can practice and learn all the moves against A.I opponents. Standard training is unstructured while in Advanced training you must progress through a series of specified tasks.

There are plenty of game modes and there's plenty to do in single player. The 'Quest mode' alone will take a bit of time as the A.I difficulty rises significantly as you play through it. Even on the easiest setting beating the final opponent to gain each treasure can become a real challenge. Luckily multiplayer is heaps of fun. I've had some amazing fights against the forum guys, Rommer and Skooby that were very evenly matched. Skooby isn't even much of a fighting game fan but he seemed pretty impressed with Tao Feng. Maybe for a sequel we will see 4 player Tag modes and even some Xbox live action with a worldwide ranking ladder.