I hadn't heard anything about a new Mortal Kombat game until Search66 mentioned something about seeing it at the Nintendo Cube Club in Baltimore. The last I'd heard, Midway had promised never to make another Mortal Kombat game ever, following upon the disgraces known as Sub-Zero Adventures and Mortal Kombat Gold.
Well, they lied.
Search66 says it stole the show at the Cube Club, and while I don't know about that, it certainly stole my $5. The plot for this game has the newly Hispanic Shang Tsung escaping his eternal prison yet again. This time around he teams up with a new foe, Quan Chi, who unlocks the power of some rune stone or another. They kill off Kintaro, and then kill off Liu Kang.
So, now you have to stop this, this...Deadly Alliance.
I wish they had stopped the damn thing in the design phase, because now I've wasted my time actually trying to play the damn thing.
As a warning, I never liked the Mortal Kombat series. I always felt that they were a cheap rip-off of Street Fighter, which tried to add in digitized people and gore in order to stop people from noticing the lack of quality gameplay. But Search said it was really good... so once my local Blockbuster had it in stock I picked it up, for the same reason I have rented every other game this month, because they still don't have NBA Live 2003 in stock.
Test Your Fight
This time around you have 3 different fighting styles. You'll know which one you're using because it tells you in the lower left corner. None of these are too different from one another, except for the style that allows you to use a weapon. This is neat and all, but essentially useless, because there's only one style of fighting in Mortal Kombat: Cheese.
Every character has a super-cheese move. Midway apparently thought this equated to game balance. Moloch has a variety of moves which will hit you (blocking or not) from the length of the screen. He can also grab your head in the middle of an attack, and throw you by it. Some characters can impale you with their weapons, and you'll bleed for the rest of the round. Sub-Zero no longer has to hit you with a projectile for you to be frozen... he just wills it to be.
But whatever, I obviously don't like the Mortal Kombat style of play. So, I'm going to spare you most of my thoughts on why it is a bad system, and move to the other parts of the game that basically spit in the face of the player. If you do happen to like the Mortal Kombat style of fighting, and/or you like(d) Mortal Kombat Lead, then scroll down to the bottom part where other people counter my review, because the main body of this review isn't going to be very useful to you.
Graphics
None of the characters look human. They all look like someone decided to make an action figure first, and then put the action figure into the game. So you're playing a walking, punching, plastic-y action figure.
Lame.
Then you have the blood spewing everywhere every time you get hit. It's retarded. It looks like an inverse "Black Oil" effect from the X-Files. What makes this even stupider is that each character has this bounding layer around it. (I had Johnny Cage bounce off of air when he should have landed on my head or pushed me.) If you turn at a right angle, you'll notice that the blood isn't running down your character at all...it's running down the bubble that surrounds your character. You'll see a gap of air between the blood and the player.
Extra Lame.
The character designs all suck. You have your generic jiggly females, (Sorry, honey, you can't be a martial artist... your boobs aren't nearly big enough.) and your stupid, stock guy fighters. Johnny Cage looks exactly like a He-Man action figure wearing sunglasses. I can't think of a single fighting game I've played recently where the characters looked this bad... even Virtua Fighter 4.
Ultra Lame.
Fatalities are back. Yay. I've seen two. One where I got jumped on twice and I exploded, and another where someone punched into my skull and pulled out my brain. Except, what I think was supposed to be my character's brain had already exploded out of my head. I can understand how this might have been cool when the main audience was a bunch of pre-teenagers...it doesn't come close now.
Lame-Tality.
Animation
The whole thing ends up feeling like Mike Tyson's Heavyweight Boxing, where your characters move like they're in molasses. To make matters worse, nobody moves fluidly at all. Li Mei's launcher kick in her default stance is a joke: She flicks her leg up, and the other guy goes into a somersault. When you block, you block the same way in every non-weapon stance. When blocking your character looks like they're doing Tiger Woods' celebration, or shaking their fist at you. None of the combos feel like they "link". In Street Fighter, when Guile hits you with a Jab, linked to a Sonic Boom, linked to a Flash Kick, it looks like it was supposed to happen that way. There's so much pausing in between moves in MK:DA, that combos look merely accidental... moves that happened to hit within a half second of each other.
Extras
You can collect "koins" of various types to unlock stuff in the "Krypt". You get these "koins" by winning battles in Arcade mode, progressing through training, and winning the mini-games. Most of the stuff is useless, but you can unlock other characters in here. There's 26 * 26 krypts (676 if you don't want to do the math, heathen.) + 1 more, I think. I only opened like 5 of them, because I really didn't give a damn, especially seeing as how one of the things I unlocked was some picture of a mental patient screaming while holding a katana. Or it could have been an employee (like there's any difference). If you do like the game, there may be plenty to keep you interested there.
The only thing that I thought was even remotely funny was that there's a new mini-game called "Test Your Sight" where you play a variation of 3 Card Monty. This could have been the perfect marketing opportunity: You could have stuff like "Test Your Sprite", and you'd hit the buttons rapidly to shake up a can of Sprite and then one of the other characters would unknowingly walk by and open the can and it'd get all over them. Maybe even "Test Your Kite", or "Test Your Flight". You could probably make a Mortal Kombat version of Track & Field out of all this.
You do have a fairly extensive single player mode, though, should you choose to take advantage of it. My guess is that they liked the way Soul Calibur had you unlocking all the extras, and put their own little spin on all of that. Once again, if you like the game, this is great for you. If you are hating the fact that you have it, well, then there's just more of it to hate for you.
Stuff That's a Disgrace
I send a heartfelt apology from the gaming community to any practitioner of a martial arts style that is in this game. The fact that anyone might think that what you've learned is anything like the fighting in this game would be enough to make me give up martial arts altogether.
Then there's stuff that's just disgraceful to Asian people in general. For instance, Li Mei looks like she's a drug-addled prostitute. And this is before she gets punched in the face. She has a fighting style called "Lui He Ba Fa". It's supposed to be a reference to the fact that there are 6 focal points on the body, and 8 extremities to attack with.
One problem: 6 in Chinese is "Liu", not "Lui". Midway spells it "Lui" the entire game. There are also various other things like the drunken master "Bo Rai Cho" which is not a Chinese name, but rather, a pun on "Borracho" which is "drunk" in Spanish. It does however, help explain why Shang Tsung looks an awful lot like one of the 3 Musketeers.
Normally, I don't really care to be PC. But the general feeling I get from Midway's portrayal of Asians from this and other games in the series is that, "Hey, that Asian stuff is cool, but it'd be better if it was Whiter." Kind of like they view 4,000 years of history and culture as neat source material for their game and it doesn't fit, they'll change it to fit their audience. I don't like that at ALL.
As another point of example, listen to the sounds the characters make when they get hit, or power up. It sounds like they got people in the office and said, "Hey, go make some Chinese noises in the microphone". (Either that, or they're yelling, "I am origami panda!") I understand that the game's supposed to be based off of Big Trouble in Little China which was a hilarious tongue-in-cheek movie. (And recently released on DVD.) This isn't hilarious...nor is it tongue-in-cheek... it's head-in-ass.
I'd be more upset, except for the fact that the guys who did this game seem to have no concept of English either. In the Character Selection screen, you have each character's Name, Alignment, Status, Height, and Weight. Only, Status doesn't list any type of status...it lists their JOB. For example, Johnny Cage is "Status: Actor". The definition of "status" is, from dictionary.com, "n 1: the relative position or standing of things or especially persons in a society". Notice it doesn't say, "What a person does for a living".
Then, on top of that, Midway's trademark replacing all the "C"s with "K"s isn't even done right. You'll see sentences with words that begin with the letter "C" in the same sentence as words where they've replaced the "C" with a "K". It feels totally half-assed, like nearly everything else with this game does.
Midway, do us a favor, and make this your series fatality. Never make a non-sports game again. The general consensus of my friends and myself is that this game was made by a mandate of Congress so they could update their "violent video game" stock footage. Other than that, I don't see why this game was made. As always, your opinion may vary.
