When the original Mortal Kombat came out, games were somewhat careful
about showing blood and death in games. MK earned a lot of press for
its fatality moves, and huge amounts of blood spilled by the fighters.
However, the gameplay of the series was never really on par with its
competitors at the arcade. Games like Street Fighter were much deeper.
MK2 did make a lot of improvements, but the series will always be known
for gore, not for great fighting. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is
very much in this tradition. It's very violent, very bloody, but not
that great of a fighting game.
On the plus side, there is a lot of content packed on the disc. The character
roster sits at about 20 fighters. Most of these are classic characters
like Raiden, Johnny Cage, and Scorpion. However, there are a lot of new
fighters in the mix as well, who vary widely. There's a drunken fist
master who can trip you up by vomiting on the floor. There's a rather
buxom Chinese woman who plays a bit like Liu Kang. And there's a
Sub-Zero knockoff named Frost that retains most of Sub-Zero's moves.
Each has three fighting stances, a weapon, and a couple of fatality
moves.
Beyond simply fighting in the story mode, MK:DA has a "Konquest Mode."
This is basically a training mode for each character where you'll learn
their moves and engage in battles with a variety of foes. Doing this
earns you credits that you can use to unlock new content.
The amount of unlockables is astounding. Most of this is useless, like
unlocking pictures of the development team. However, some of the
unlockables include additional characters, alternate outfits, and some
videos.
However, all of this content doesn't make up for the lackluster combat.
The days of Mortal Kombat style fighting are passed. Today's fighters
are technical, fluid, and extremely deep. Tekken and Virtual Fighter
are examples of this. In those games, each fighter has a wide variety
of moves to use in different circumstances. MK:DA doesn't play like
that at all. Fighting feels stiff. There are few combos to utilize,
despite each fighter having three combat stances. You'll basically
block your opponent's combo, use the same couple of combos over and
over again, and perform a fatality. There's little skill involved in
this game, and your characters just don't have the same agile feel like
more recent fighting games.
The graphics don't help matters, either. There's nothing wrong with
MK:DA's visuals, but there's nothing notable about them either. The
backgrounds do vary quite a bit, but none of them are truly
spectacular. Your characters look somewhat cartoony, and they do move a
bit stiffly. The series' hallmark, buckets of blood, looks terrible.
Blood moves in huge, slow clumps and looks totally unrealistic. The
fatalities are nicely animated, but the shock factor is gone from them,
and they feel unneccesary.
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance attempts to reinvent MK, but it
basically sticks to the same formula as its predecessors. This may have
been a good game five or six years ago, but the more technical fighters
have upped the bar in how one-on-one combat should play. I would pass
on this game.
