I've always said that fight games are one of the reasons to buy a console. Nothing beats kicking the hell out of your friends by bashing the buttons of your controller and it seems that Microsoft realises this aswell as next to launch title Dead or Alive 3 and major seller Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance we will soon see a Microsoft Game Studios fight game, Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus.

In Metro-China - the state formerly known as California - two old Chinese sects are fighting out an old vete. Pale Lotus are the good guys, Black Mantis the bad. Simple story, but who gives a damn ?

There's 12 characters available - 6 for each cult - and you have to use them to collect artefacts. Each artefact consists out of 6 pieces so for each artefact you'll have to fight six times after which you get to fight the obligatory endboss.

The characters look nicely modelled but are very cliché. Every character you know from other fight games is present, going from strong but slow men to fast women that kick faster than their own shadow. Also the monologues they say before a match starts are all but original and to be honest: after a while they started to annoy me.

Each character has several moves available including some nice combo's. Next to that there's also some kind of super-special move for each character which can be unleashed when you've collected enough "chi" by kicking your opponent's ass.

This chi can also be used to heal yourself which might come in handy from time to time and this is where we also come to one of the most original aspects of this game; limbs can be broken after which they only do 50% of their normal damage.

Another thing we haven't seen in other games is the way fights are ended. While normally a character drops down, stands back up and receives again his full health, Tao Feng has another system. The character still drops down, but then we see a short animated movie where he or she steps back up and instead of receiving again full health, you get another health bar in another color. Each character has three of these health bars and when all of them are returned to zero, the fight is over.

The gameplay is pretty straight-forward and consists of mainly button-bashing. No tactical fighting here. It's mainly kicking your opponent as fast as possible and hoping that he doesn't have some brilliant counter-attack stored somewhere.

The beta copy we received showed a game which was pretty finished but there were still some issues that hopefully will be taken care of by the time the games hits the store shelves.

The sound is pretty good but I noticed from time to time during a fight that the music suddenly went completely silent and I doubt that's meant to be that way. Also the framerate suddenly drops without any apparant reason.

The good news is that there's one character in Tao Feng which stands out of the crowd of all fight games I've ever seen: Jade Dragon is the most beautiful female character I've ever seen and she's got some kind of sensuality that no other fight game character ever showed.

Tao Feng has certainly got some potential but Studio Gigante will have to do some major improvements before the game gets released as the way it is now, it's a bit too standard compared to major seller Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.