Fashionably late to the Xbox 360 launch, Dead or Alive 4 is an impressive feat of a fighting game that boasts some excellent, fast-paced action in addition to terrific good looks. Best of all, you can play it online over Xbox Live, virtually guaranteeing you'll find tough, unpredictable competition at any hour. Back when the old Xbox first debuted in 2001, Tecmo's Dead or Alive 3 served as one of the system's showcases, at least as far as its graphical horsepower was concerned. However, 2004's Dead or Alive Ultimate took a much bigger step forward, mainly because it introduced the ability to compete against other players online. Dead or Alive 4 is similar to that game (right on down to the near-identical menu system), but it adds several new characters, new moves and abilities for returning characters, and a beautiful new coat of paint to all the proceedings. It doesn't defy the conventions you've come to expect from playing other fighting games, but it's about as slick, fully featured, and exciting as fighting games get.

DOA4's lightning-fast fighting action is better than ever on the Xbox 360, so get online and start getting beat up.

DOA4 doesn't reinvent the wheel. It's nearly identical to Dead or Alive Ultimate in terms of its feature set, and the gameplay itself also arguably hasn't changed much, depending on how you look at it. On first impression, this is good old Dead or Alive, all right. The fighting is really easy to get into like always, and if you're a veteran of the series, you can still rely on many of the same moves and strategies that have served you well in past. Yet the more you play, the more you'll pick up on the combined impact of all the numerous new and changed moves for returning fighters, unique layouts of the different arenas, and tweaks to the fighting engine. Essentially, this game has a smoother, more tactical, even faster, and simply better feel than its predecessors. More importantly, the gameplay is some of the most highly refined and dynamic that you'll find in any fighting game these days. And because of the substantial selection of playable characters and good assortment of interactive arenas, there's a lot of variety where it's needed.

At the heart of every match type in Dead or Alive 4 is a contest between two fighters trying to knock each other out using various punches, kicks, throws, and reversals. There are tag-team matches where you may control a pair of fighters by quickly switching between them during the bout, but even these boil down to a one-on-one fight. As you'd probably hope from an intense martial arts competition, aggressive tactics are the order of the day--overly defensive or hesitant players tend to get slaughtered. But those who punch and kick with reckless abandon are also easy targets, since reversals and well-timed counterblows can be used to crush careless opponents. A healthy roster of nearly two dozen unique fighters is available (a handful of them are hidden at first), and though their moves and fighting styles are all different, the same basic controls apply to everyone. These controls are deceptively simple, but by using simple directional motions on the D pad together with three action buttons--one for punching, one for kicking, and one for guarding and reversals--it's possible to perform many dozens of different moves as all the various characters.

In practice, the typical DOA4 match has a good flow and rhythm to it, as well as a blazingly fast, silky-smooth look. There's a heavy emphasis on swift, painful-looking strikes and combos. All fighters are readily capable of stunning their opponents or knocking them clean off their feet, the perfect setup for a devastating string of follow-up attacks. As the showdown unfolds, occasional reversals and throws make for spectacular, often decisive twists. At the default settings, a typical best-of-three-rounds match can be over in less than a couple of minutes, but there tends to be an awful lot of action crammed into that short space of time.

The expanded roster of fighters is definitely one of the main attractions. All the old favorites are back, like ninja gals Kasumi and Ayane, Ninja Gaiden's more-famous-than-ever Ryu Hayabusa, shapely pro wrestler Tina, and Bruce Lee clone Jann Lee. And they've got plenty of new tricks up their sleeves. Dead or Alive 3's Brad Wong, a master of drunken fist kung fu (and a lush), and Christie, a scantily clad assassin, return after a hiatus and pack some of the more interesting-looking moves of the bunch. The new fighters include Kokoro, a demure karate expert specializing in open palm attacks much like those of Virtua Fighter's Akira; Eliot, a teenage boy who looks like a girl but whose praying mantis-style martial arts are unmistakably effective; and La Mariposa, a masked luchadora packing powerful kicks and stylish grappling moves. It would have been nice if DOA4's roster included a couple more fighters who...well, actually looked like fighters, rather than the outlandishly dressed, dollfaced young ladies that dominate the lineup. Nevertheless, chances are you'll find at least a few characters who appeal to you, even if the game's anime-inspired character design and its fantastically proportioned female cast won't win over everybody.

Insert pun here regarding the game's big, well-rounded cast of characters.

In stark contrast to all the other fighters is Spartan-458, a not-so-hidden character who's basically Halo's Master Chief but with a woman's voice and no guns, and who debatably deserves her own paragraph just because she's got something to do with Halo. She's a neat bonus for Halo fans, who've never seen the Master Chief's signature armor looking quite this rugged or realistic. She's even got her own nicely detailed arena to fight in, modeled after the opening level of Halo 2 and complete with plenty of vehicles you can't drive but can knock unsuspecting victims into. Too bad this statuesque lady is relatively underdeveloped as a fighter, since she just doesn't have as many moves to work with as most characters. One of her grabs, which involves shoving a sticky plasma grenade into the foe's gut, looks amazing. But most of her other attacks are lifted from the game's bigger characters, and she doesn't move or take hits differently than the other fighters despite all that armor. Still, the more fighters, the merrier, as long as there's a balanced lineup in the end. DOA4 seems to accomplish that balance surprisingly well. Though the quicker characters are easier to learn, everybody seems highly viable in the right hands. To put it another way, when playing online through the course of several hundred matches against random live opponents, we were pleased to routinely encounter just about every fighter in the roster, rather than the same several characters over and over. See? We didn't give the whole paragraph to Spartan-458.