Ultimate Fighting Championship, for those of you not into American extreme fighting franchises, is the most brutal, bloody circus of men-in-pants violence you can imagine. Psychopathic rednecks kick and punch each other until they pass out, or one of them begs for mercy by slapping the floor - the 'tapout' of the title. Of all the sports in the world, this is the one you'd really want to have a doctor's note for.

All of which makes it ripe for a video game adaptation. It's not hard to see the appeal of smashing a lairy muscleman in the face, and here there are none of the life-threatening consequences you'd get in real life. UFC: Tapout features 27 real-life UFC thugs ready to belt one another around the chops, and like the sport it simulates, it's savage.

It feels like a hybrid between a hulking, grapplesome wrestling game and the faster fisticuffs of something like Dead Or Alive 3. Each of the four main buttons is assigned to a different limb, allowing for some swift left-right-kick combos. Pressing buttons together allows for grapples and counters - both of which are essential techniques if you want to leave the ring with an intact face. It's also an intuitive system that lets you get stuck in quickly, and also learn new techniques as you go on.

As you get into the game, you'll find yourself guffawing and wincing in equal measure as you smack a scumbag's face into the canvas, splashing his blood all over the place - it's like Jerry Springer, but without all the intrusive morality. But once the initial amusement (or horror) at the violence has subsided, what's left is a playable, if unspectacular, fighter.

The uncompromising violence means that bouts don't tend to last long. Each fighter tries to wear the other down with nose-splitting punches and shin-crunching kicks before grappling them to the floor and bludgeoning them into unconsciousness. Fights lengthen dramatically once you get the hang of the counters, letting you turn practically any attack against the aggressor.

But despite the generous amount of fighters, there's not a huge amount of variety in the way they play or look.

Whereas a beat-'em-up like Soul Calibur or Dead Or Alive 3 provides wildly differing characters and outlandish moves, Tapout is constrained by its realism. Although the combatants boast different fighting disciplines like wrestling or kickboxing, they don't really feel that different to one another - meaning there's a lack of variety in the combat.

It's a mixed bag in the looks department, too. The characters are well done - never have thick-necked men in pants been so lovingly modelled and animated. They all look just like their real-life counterparts, are packed with plenty of detail and they move smoothly. But this graphical excellence doesn't extend to the fighting arena, which consists of a drab canvas and a dark, almost black background. It looks like it was cobbled together in a hurry.

There are other annoyances, such as the TV-Style presentation, which attempts to show grapples from a ringside view. Occasionally it uses an angle that puts a fence-post directly between the camera and the action. When it happens, it's all too easy to lose the bout because you can't see what the hell is going on - which is very frustrating. Capping it all off, is the poor presentation. The menu screens are functional enough, but they look cheap and nasty.

But for its faults, the game achieves what it sets out to do - provide remarkably vicious fights by the ambulance-load. The punches and kicks that you rain down upon your opponent are solid and painful, and successfully flipping an opponent onto their back and punching their lights out is satisfying in a primal way.

The fighting core of Tapout is very playable, and matches between two players familiar with the counters and grapples can be a lot of fun. Single players may get bored quickly thanks to the lack of variety, but with a friend to fight, UFC: Tapout becomes something much better, letting you bash one another to pieces in a pleasingly violent fashion.

1. Great characters
2. Intuitive controls
3. Incredibly violent

1. Not much to it
2. Some odd camera angles
3. No variety in the fighters' get-ups

Power
The fighters make the most of Xbox hardware - their surroundings do not.

Style
The menu screens and general presentation of the game are as stylish as an lowa trailer park.

Immersion
Splitting people's faces is fun, and there are plenty of square-jawed faces to do it to...

Lifespan
...but it's too repetitive in single-player. Two-player matches are a top laugh though.

Summary
A decent, brutal two-player fighter, but a bit one dimensional if you don't have anyone to play against.