I guess the proper way to begin this review would be to briefly discuss the Mortal Kombat franchise and the controversy that surrounds it. Well I figure everyone knows all about that mess, so I’ll just give a quick run down of the games:

Mortal Kombat: Bad
Mortal Kombat 2: Better
Mortal Kombat 3: Worse
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3: see above
Mortal Kombat 4: njarnbelabhlbta

After MK4, Midway wisely took a break from the MK games, and then a new influx of fighting games came in and made the series practically forgotten. Then, _____ years later (yes I am lazy) they announce MK Deadly Alliance, and here we are.

I’ll be the first to admit that I never really cared to learn about the MK storyline, since most of it is a jumblefuck of excuses to allow characters to die and come back in later installments. So of course in this one, Liu Kang is killed (right) and Shang Tsung and Quan Chi form a DEADLY ALLIANCE to take over Earth or whatever and you have to stop them. Oh and Shao Kahn dies too, but in such a stupid way that it isn’t even worth mentioning.

Surprisingly, they changed the gameplay around totally for this installment. Now, instead of like three special moves, a sweep, an uppercut, a round house, and a flurry of infinite punches that take 40% of your life, you get two fighting stances and a weapon stance each complete with their own set of attacks and combos, and er…three special moves. The different stances are probably one of the most interesting parts of the game, since you can also string combos from stance to stance (although it’s pretty useless and doing a small set of combos can yield the same amount of damage results). It’s nice how they did this to add more depth to all the characters, but once you start playing you’ll pretty much use only one fighting stance and the weapon stance, since remembering the moves and combos of all three for each character would require an insane amount of memorization. Also it’s obvious that the developers started getting lazy later on, since quite a few people share the exact same weapon stances.

The characters are a mixed bag for me. Scorpion and Subzero get much more detail (and actually look different omfg). Kung Lao and Johnny Cage look pimp as always, and Raiden and Kano look roughly the same. Kenshi, without a doubt the best new character, is a blind swordsman who uses telekenises (fuck that word). Quan Chi and Shang Tsung don’t exactly look great by any measure, but they at least look less gay then they did in previous installments. But the greatest accomplishments by far are the looks of all of the women. I WILL ADMIT that at times I do like to select Kitana and have her stay idle and get hit repeatedly while I place the vibrating controller on my erect penis and listen to her screams and moans. I’ve never actually masturbated to the game though, because that’s just for sick perverts.

Then we have the rest of the cast. I don’t know what the hell is up with Mavado, because he is the only character that I refuse to play ever, but he uses some stupid tentacle attacks or something and is generally gay. Oh, he apparently killed Kabal (who has been announced to be in the next installment, big surprise) and took his swords, so whatever. Then we have Hsu Hao, another person that I rarely ever play, mainly because he looks like a cross between Brock Lesnar and the police guy from the Village People. Reptile continues to lose even more of his humanity/heterosexuality in this game as well, looking like a Godzilla reject and possessing some of the most retarded stances in the game. For whatever reason, they decided to throw in one of those extremely retarded ninja motocross robots, Cyrax (HE’S BLACK!?!?!?!). They also brought back Jax, this time attempting to give him a thugged out look and failed miserably. Bo Rai Cho is supposed to be an Outworld master of all martial arts, but they expect us to believe this while he appears as a fat piece of shit and uses one of the most useless martial art styles ever. Drahmin is so horrendous that I refuse that the staff was in full control of their senses when they created him.

(night out at the bar)

BOON: HEY YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE COOL DUEDS?
MIDWAY GRUNT: What?
BOON: WE SHOULD MAKE A CAHRACTER TATS A WALKING PIECE OF SHIT!
BOON: AND HE COULD HAVE FLIES AROUND HIM AND STUFF
BOON: AND HIS NAME WILL BE SEMEN OF SOMETHING
MIDWAY GRUNT: Whatever you say sir!
BOON: COME HERE AND LICK MY ASSHOLE

The midboss monster character for this installment is Moloch, a big monkey looking blue thing that wields a concrete ball thingy. He’s a little difficult until you learn his ridiculously easy patterns, and in no time you’ll be able to pull off flawless victories on his ass.

This game does make a lot of advancements for the series, but it was obviously somewhat rushed and is horrendously broken. Kenshi can do a lot of crazy shit by using combos mixed with his telekiwhatever, Johnny Cage and Sonya have ridiculously easy combos that have high priority and do huge damage, and the Katana/ninja sword is a monster weapon that rapes just about everything.

The main complaint most people had with this game are the fatalities (or lack thereof). Every character has only one fatality, and the majority of them are really lame and ridiculous. For example, in Quan Chi’s fatality he performs the horrifying act of STRETCHING THE OPPONENT’S NECK REALLY LONG. The fact that the fatalities were shit didn’t really bother me at all though, because the game has evolved to a point where they shouldn’t need to be the main attraction anymore. We aren’t 10 years old anymore, and some guy pulling some other guy’s head off won’t awe us nowadays. What I did like was that they made the Fatalities so that you would ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO PULL THEM OFF MORE THAN ONCE IN YOUR LIFETIME. There’s no more having to stand exactly 3.5 cm away from your opponent and having to press up down left run run block hk lk block block run up up hp lp lp in 3 seconds to do them. In fact, they practically give you all day and it’s only a simple 4 button or so command.

The worst feature of the game by far is The Krypt. Basically the Krypt is a graveyard filled with hundreds of Koffins where you unlock new arenas, secret characters, etc. You unlock Koffins in the Krypt by collecting Kombat Koins, which act as Kurrency. Whoever thought that this would be a good idea is a fucking Kunt. Out of the entire collection of the Koffins, about 10% of it is useful stuff YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO UNLOCK, and 500% of it is retarded posters and useless 5 second Photoshop creations that apparently someone out there found funny. There is some stuff a hardcore MK fan (all three of them) would find interesting, like concept art and the MK comic in it’s entirety, but if you’re not one of those people you’re better off going to gamefaqs or something and looking up the useful Koffins. I guess they threw this option in as a last ditch effort to increase the replay value. Either way, I feel sorry for the poor soul who had to play the game long enough to unlock every single Koffin.

This game isn’t without its merits though. The Konquest feature is a nice addition, which puts you through a sort of training session with each character so you can learn the intricacies of their stances and attacks. The test your might and sight things are fun for the first two times or so, but unfortunately there’s no way to turn them off at all once you get tired of them. I enjoyed the endings also, mainly because it was fun to see most of the characters get fucked up in various ways.

Overall, I think this was a decent attempt for the franchise to enter into the fighting game world once again, but it has a long way to go before it can compete with the Tekkens, Soul Caliburs, Virtua Fighters, or fuck, even DBZ Budokais of the world (I probably went too far there, but you get the idea).