Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus

Characters look the part

Tao Feng is a new one-on-one fighter from one of the creators of the Mortal Kombat series. It features all of the gore that made Mortal Kombat such a successful series, but whilst staying true to his past, Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias has tried to innovate in a genre that is constantly changing.

The one-on-one fighter has its past rooted in relatively simple games like the Street Fighter series, where all combatants had three special moves and basic punch and kick attacks. The mid 1990’s saw the emergence of the combo as a special move in a step away from the supernatural special moves of Street Fighter. The pinnacle of this combo idea was Rare’s Killer Instinct; this saw gamers expertly stringing together graceful looking 100+ hit combos. Tao Feng tries to implement combos to make fights look more realistic and graceful affairs.

Questing

Some of the characters seem to have confused the fighting with a peaceful protest

The game caters for one or two players. The Quest mode is the main single player mode and sees you controlling every member of one sect and pitting him or her against every member of the rival sect for pieces to a sacred relic. Once completed this relic will give the owner the secret of immortality. This quest plays out the story of Tao Feng, which is one of rivalry between two martial arts sects in new China. The sects are the Black Mantis and the Pale Lotus, respectively the bad guys and the good guys.

Both sects are driven by a desire to claim the relic and gain immortality. The usual two player modes are also on offer including team battle and one-on-one. A single player can also compete in a survival mode.

Supernatural special moves

Too old to be fighting.

Each character in Tao Feng has a series of supernatural special moves on top of their combos. These are known as Chi moves and become available when a chi power bar has filled up. They are single hit, super power attacks that are activated by pressing the white button and often leave your opponent dazed for a few moments giving you an opportunity to get in with a nifty combo to top it off. The Chi bar is filled by being aggressive. The more aggressively you play the faster the chi bar fills. Chi is also required to heal damaged limbs.

Round 1

I once caught a fish this big

Tobias has tried to create a different sort of one-on-one fighter. Rather than copying the model set out by other games in the genre he, and Studio Gigante, have taken the bits that work from other fighters and taken a new twist on proceedings. Most notably absent are a timer and rounds. Whilst fights aren’t structured on rounds as they are in most other games there is a sort of round-based structure. Instead fights are essentially based on a best of five rounds rather than the traditional three. Rounds are not referred to in the game but each character has three energy bars.

When the first, green, one is depleted they move to the second, yellow, one. After the Yellow bar is consumed the third, red, one is used. Once this is gone the fight is over. The game flows between rounds by not resetting the energy bars and scenery. The victors’ energy bar stays where it is and the scenery remains in the state that it was before the round finished.

Break a leg

Scenery can all be destroyed

Tao Feng tries to innovate by implementing a “realistic damage model”. This sees characters arms and legs become damaged during the course of a game. Once damaged, attacks with that part of the body are limited to 50% of normal damage until the player heals themselves with Chi. Limbs are damaged by excessive blocking and by being hit into the scenery too many times. If you block too much, you’ll get a limb damage warning. If you continue to block or get hit into the scenery then this will change to a limb damage danger alert.

From here only one strike to the arms or legs will be required to suffer limb damage. This has been implemented slightly oddly. For instance, if your opponent is given a limb damage danger alert because you keep hitting them in the arm then to cause limb damage you must cleanly hit a limb. If you cleanly hit their leg then it is the leg that suffers the damage and not the battered arms. The idea though is clearly to force players to be more aggressive in their fighting style.

A real bruiser

Characters bruise as the fight goes on

The other aspect to the damage model is that of bruising. The idea here is that as the characters fight their bodies and clothes change to reflect this damage. Again, this only seems to be half-heartedly implemented. Characters do get damaged but this only really seems to show up after each “round”: the losing character is show in a short cut-scene picking themselves up and here you can clearly see the bruising and damage to the clothes.

This damage remains visible during the fight but does not appear to get worse during the fight. The result looks realistic enough, clothes are torn and characters look battered and bruised. It’s just that it’s the same every time and not dependant on the actual fighting.

Learning to fight

Fighters posture off before the fighting commences

Tao Feng relies on combos to make the fighting flow nicely. The combos require very precise timing, which can make it a bit difficult for beginners to pick up. Button mashing is very unrewarding resulting in very stilted fights. Unlike the grace of Dead or Alive 3 where combos can be easily uncovered by hitting a few buttons, Tao Feng is only rewarding to those prepared to put the effort into memorising the combo sequences.

In DOA3 the fights flowed nicely without the necessity of learning lengthy combos, so whilst Tao Feng can play smoothly it requires a lot of time to really perfect all of a characters’ combos.

Mass destruction

The opening movies are artistically directed

A lot of effort has been put into the look of this game. Fighters are richly detailed and environments are very interactive. The environments aren’t interactive to the same extent as DOA3 with multi-tiered levels, though. In Tao Feng when you hit an opponent into a window, it shatters but play continues in the same level. The characters move very well and are smoothly animated through all of the fight moves. The developers have also ensured that anything in the environment can be destroyed or interacted with in some way: The walls crack when a fighter is hit against them, floor tiles crack and other scenery can be destroyed also. Particularly noteworthy is the gong on one level. When a fighter is hit into this, the accompanying sound effect is of the gong being struck.

Every level has a pole of some sort in it, which can be used to launch attacks off as the characters can swing around it and jump off towards the opponent, and this can also be done with the walls. If a character becomes trapped near a wall then they can jump off the wall towards the opponent, this prevents fights becoming unbalanced by players trapping the opponents in a corner. The downside to this level of detail is an occasional drop in the frame rate, although this is not common.

Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus

Tao Feng : Fist of the Lotus is basically a slightly flawed product. It’s no DOA3, either in terms of its looks, how easy it is to pick up or how much depth there is to uncover. There are better games in this genre out there like DOA3 or MK: Deadly Alliance but this is not a bad game. It looks good and sounds good but it will take a lot of effort to play it anywhere approaching well. Fortunately the game has a wide range of difficulty settings, although these just make the computer AI a bit more stupid, the opponents just stand there and don’t use their Chi powers appropriately.