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Review: Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus |
I really don’t like writing about average fighting games. The greats I can wax lyrically and romantically over and the bad I can shred with malefic glee, but the ones in the middle are just there; lending themselves to neither amusing analogy or streams of curses. And then I start to feel that hateful phrase “solid, but uninspiring” burning just beneath the tips of my fingers.
And it won’t be burning much stronger than it is now, because Tao Feng is quite possibly the most average fighting game I’ve played in years.
Advertising itself as “from the co-creator of Mortal Kombat” (not sure who exactly that’s supposed to impress), Tao Feng is a free-roaming 3D fighter with a distinctly oriental bent.
Comparisons with Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance are both inevitable and justified. It’s good looking, it’s full of cod-mysticism with characters grounded in martial arts movie myth, and it’s another attempt at making a ’serious’ fighting game. And just like MKDA it fails to achieve it’s goal.
It’s not all bad, though. For one the game looks absolutely gorgeous. The character models are amazingly well-rendered, clean and solid-looking. They move well and are packed with detail and neat touches. The way two characters interact – throws and holds and the like is easily the most realistic I’ve ever seen. The backgrounds are just as spectacular – incredibly crisp, clear and realistic, and full of astounding detail and plenty of interactive (ie, breakable) objects. Some of the effects on some of the stages – rain, spotlights and water are simply beautiful.
The presentation of the game itself is professional, doing a decent job evoking the necessary aura of mysticism, ancient clans and magic – and the options and extra modes are comprehensive and well-implemented.
Can you feel it? The big ‘but’ hanging in the air? I can. Although that could be because I’m typing this thing (at work no less, naughty naughty)
BUT (oh yeah) as we know well by now, all that counts for nought if the actual game is lacking. And is this ever lacking.
The controller layout is familiar enough, with four attack buttons, a ‘leading’ (or nearest to the enemy) and ‘trailing’ (farthest from the enemy) punch and kick.
Blocking is done by holding back, and jumping and crouching are activated by firm presses of ‘up’ and ‘down respectively. The ‘free walk’ function can be activated by either pressing back on the D-pad for a second, and then another direction to begin walking, or using the left analogue stick for instant movement. I found trying to play with two separate thumbpads (many of the movement functions are D-Pad-only) extremely unintuitive and didn’t lend itself at all to any semblance of instinctive and satisfying play. In fact the controls are cripplingly unresponsive in general (trying to block high then low for a multi-hitting attack is a real pain) and make the game feel much more like a chore than anything remotely resembling fun.
The biggest drawback as far as I’m concerned is the combat itself. It’s all so very dull, so belaboured and repetitive. One of the main reasons for this is the supplied moves lists. I can’t remember the last time I saw such such a tedious set of character moves in a fighting game.
They’ve clearly tried to take the “serious” route – away from ice blasts, eye lasers and soul stealing and instead tried to focus on the kind of combat and movements more commonly found in the Virtua Fighter games. But even VF had it’s moments of spectacle and unadulterated power, Tao Feng is just brutally uninspired from first punch to final KO. The normal attacks are the usual punches, kicks, uppercuts, jabs, sweeps, flips and rushes, there are no ’special’ moves as such, merely more of the punches/kicks/flips and jumps seen elsewhere. Many of the characters have multiple stances, but this still provides little in the way of variety.
The one exception to this rule are the chi attack ’supers’ – activated by pressing the archaic ’super move’ button when the chi meter is filled. Most of these attacks look fairly swish, but some of them are absolutely amazing (Master Sage’s reality-warping slow-motion ki field springs to mind) and, obviously, do more damage than usual attacks. The downside to these attacks are the complete lack of invincibility on start-up, meaning that any little jab or kick to the shins will knock you out of the move, and, frustratingly, still cost you your entire chi meter.
The combos in the game come in two flavours – juggles after launch moves and short button sequences. Because of the lead-like collision detection, sluggish controls, easily-stuffed supers and lack of both useful and spectacular moves – the fights tend to boil down to mashing out auto-combo after auto-combo in the hope that yours lands before the enemies’ does. It’s all dreadfully uninspiring, and not fit to polish the sandals/armour/thigh-length boots of any of the big name 3D fighting games.
It’s a shame – because with a little more speed, improved response time and the addition of some actually useful moves Tao Feng could have been really rather nice. Alas, it was not to be.
What’s more, all the promised ‘innovations’, the selling points of TF:FOTL according to the box, are actually all either lame gimmicks, or purely aesthetic developments. The ‘limb damage’ system sounds promising, but basically comes down to hitting a blocking opponent either high or low until they get a ‘limb damage’ warning. Here, unless they expend their chi meter to heal themselves, they’ll then either deal less damage, or move slower for the rest of the round, depending on where they were hit. It’s certainly no Bushido Blade in that respect.
The ‘interactive’ environments are equally uninteresting. You can be knocked into crates/walls/panes of glass and stuff – looks nice, zero impact on gameplay. The offensive items – the poles you can swing from and walls you can jump from – again they look rather nifty, but there’s really no reason to use them as opposed to any other attack in the game.
As for the ‘real-time damage’ effect, it looks gorgeous (Iron Monk’s armour gets dented and loses it’s sheen, characters get dirty, bloody, scratched and bruised) – but it’s hardly world-changing, and you won’t even notice it after the third fight.
Tao Feng has the dubious honour of having quite possibly the worst cast of characters I’ve seen in years. Terrible names aside, none of them are even remotely interesting, or memorable, falling as they do into the expected stereotypes and totally neglecting to do absolutely anything entertaining or reaction-provoking whatsoever. Much like MKDA, the female characters in the game are hysterically over-sexualised, to the point where they make the girls of Dead or Alive look like nuns. The “sexy” dialogue that they begin and end each round with is skin-crawlingly embarrassing.
In fact all of the dialogue in the game is awful. The wise old man, the cocky martial artists, the thuggish brutes and aforementioned “hotties” – all deliver the most asinine UR GUNG-FU IS NON EXISTENT, BIG BOY speeches with no presence or acting talent whatsoever.
One thing worth mentioning about the game is the complete lack of (for want of better description) an ‘arcade mode’. There’s a ’single match mode’; where you pick a character and an enemy and fight one fight, there’s a ‘quest’ mode, where each character has six enemies to beat (in any order) in order to collect six pieces of an amulet.
There’s a training mode, tournament and survival modes and the usual options, but no real ‘normal’ mode, which to me feels kind of weird. Still, the quest mode is a decent enough replacement.
So that’s Tao Feng, or rather, the parts of it I feel are worth mentioning. Regarding the score at the top of the page, it is my intention to denote a true sense of averageness, because this game is not awful, and indeed, in an alternate universe where Capcom, SNK, Arc, Namco and Sega didn’t exist, and Tomonobu Itagaki was getting laid on a regular basis, would probably actually be something of a masterpiece. However we are not in that universe and as such the concepts put into execution in TF are still years behind anything the aforementioned companies have ever put out, and as such can never be anything more than mediocre.
However I do feel that at some protozoic level it’s still a somewhat competent game; the sort of fighting game that people who don’t play fighting games might play and enjoy, and also because, for all its flaws, it’s still a step in the right direction, much like MKDA was, and this showing of potential does I think deserve at least a little encouragement. And while I cannot recommend it with a clear conscience, and will most definitely be returning it to the shop I bought it from, I’d be interested in seeing what they could do with a sequel.
