Kan The Kaos Of Armageddon Kause Kalamity?

By Thomas Machuca

The fury of Mortal Kombat has brought the realms of this world to the brink of total destruction. Every warrior has been summoned to this last epic battle, where survival depends on their ability to… FIGHT!

This is the flimsy premise of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, but provides the game with plenty of scope for rending flesh from bone and ripping hearts from rib cages. It also delves further into in the ‘Konquest Mode’, which is like an adventure-action mode where you will be spending most of your time when playing MK:A on your own. Konquest Mode is back for the third time running and it has been given a complete refining once again, but more on this later.

A quick run down on the key features that will hopefully grab your attention in this newest installment to the Mortal Kombat franchise is as follows:

• Fight as any of the 60 plus characters from the entire Mortal Kombat Universe

• Kreate-A-Fighter mode allows you to make ‘kustomisable’ characters you can take online

• Finish off your opponents with the all-new Kreate-A-Fatality system

• Experience deep, story driven adventures in the enhanced Konquest mode

• Deliver powerful combo attacks in mid-air with new Aerial Kombat

• Go racing “MK-style” with up to 8 players online in all-new Motor Kombat

Well, that pretty much sums up all that I was going to write up so I’ll leave it there instead of boring you with all the details. Short and sweet is my credo for this review. Enjoy!

…Yeah, as if! I just ripped those points straight from the cover, and like I would leave my loyal readers with such garbage. So on to the rest of my review…

When you boot up the game you will firstly be shown a cool cutscene, which any faithful Mortal Kombat fan would become mesmerised with, as many of their favourite characters make an appearance. Then you’re greeted with a host of menu items; Kombat, Kreate a Fighter, Konquest, Motor Kombat, MK Online, and The Krypt, just to mention a few.

Kombat is your basic arcade version, with three types of modes; arcade, versus, and practice (all self-explanatory). Firstly, you will be knocked back by the sheer amount of characters made initially playable when selecting your character, a grand total of 58 out of 62. 

They are aligned across 8 separate rows on the character select screen and you have all the classics like Sub-Zero, Scorpion, and Johnny Cage, to newer, much loved characters like Jax, Kung Lao, and Baraka, and not forgetting the series’ bosses like Goro, Shao Kahn, and Montoro. Basically, nearly every character that has graced the Mortal Kombat universe spanning the series’ entire history is included. 

And if you were wandering, the remaining four characters are unlocked by fulfilling various tasks in Konquest mode.

Regardless of which character you take control of, each one has eight fights to win before they can claim victory over the other warriors. Unlike the previous title, now most of the characters only have two fighting styles instead of three, which is easily switchable while playing with the quick tap of a button. Most characters have one martial art style and a weapon style and they all have their own distinct weapon which is always good to see.

The fighting stages have multiple areas which are awesome (side note: ‘awesome’ is used entirely too much nowadays… shame on me) and the environments can effect players. For example, you can kick your opponent into a catapult and send him hurling on fire, screaming for his life, at a stone tower, instantly causing fatality upon his blood splattering impact. This is certainly a great feature for Mortal Kombat which you don’t see in many other arcade fighting games. And for all you Mortal Kombat fans, there are plenty of new stages, such as the Bell Tower (where you can send your opponents ringing into a massive bell or one of the many gongs arranged around the tower), Subway (where you can fling an enemy onto the tracks of an approaching train) and Netherrealm Hell (where you can send players crashing down onto platforms while demons scream around you).

The sad part is that the gameplay hasn’t really evolved; it feels practically identical to Mortal Kombat: Deception. The engine itself needs a tuning or possibly even a trade-in because it doesn’t nearly offer the same fast-paced, fluid feel that is common to other fighting games these days – instead focusing on “dialing in” canned combos to deal damage to an opponent who leaves himself open. But by the same token, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

And it’s still going strong.

There are some changes – the defence meter from Deception is gone (“Thank you!”), you are able to parry incoming blows which leave your opponent temporarily defenseless, and Aerial Kombat is back which now make mid-air combos an important part of combat. The final change is the remake of the fatality system with the all-new Kreate-A-Fatality system. Now you are given a specific amount of time to continually input a sequence of buttons to literally dismember your foe, involving limb ripping, heart pulling, head crushing, and so forth. 

The amount of time that you have to chain together the next move rapidly decreases and if you don't actually perform the killing blow in time, you can actually “fail” the fatality. Really skilled players will be able to pump out nine or ten hit kills in this way. Fatalities are a lot easier to figure out but some people will find that it just takes too long.

Kreate-A-Fighter mode is massive. You have the ability to define basic elements such as the physical size, appearance and facial features of a fighter. You get to tailor everything from their fighting and weapon styles to special moves, but ultimately you're still stuck picking and choosing from a list of prefabricated fighting techniques. You even have the chance to choose their victory stance and write a biography for your fighter "He was born to kick ass!". More control is given to how your character looks than how he or she plays, yet this is usually what you have more fun messing around with.

Back to Konquest mode, it’s different and much better than the past; it’s more like the popular spin-off title Shaolin Monks, providing a linear exploratory adventure. No more simplistic tutorial fight missions that plagued players in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance or the time specific quests and missions in Mortal Kombat: Deception. Taven and Daegon are the new characters in MK:A, and you take the role as Taven in Konquest mode.

The gameplay in this adventure mode consists of you taking on groups of bad guys and running past deadly traps from a third-person perspective in addition to some standard MK battles all wrapped up in a convoluted storyline. There is hand-to-hand combat and supplementary powers (throw a fire projectile, freeze time, and explosively pound the ground and teleport away from incoming attacks, which costs energy to use). Sometimes you are given weapons to easily dispose of your enemies - for example, swords and hammers - and other times you use your surroundings, for example, spiked ceilings and bonfires. Whenever you slay your enemies and break objects, orbs are released which you use to replenish your health and energy bars.

There are four basic fatalities which you can use on enemies when playing in third person, all executed with a single button press. The downside is that you are unable to perform fatalities on enemies in standard fights in Konquest mode (most likely as it would destroy the storyline).

The last point worth mentioning about in Konquest mode is that this is where you unlock essentially everything; hidden and even in plain site in levels or in chests are items that unlock costumes for characters, fighter specific items, music tracks and battle arenas, plus with all the Koins you collect you will be enough to unlock tones, if not all the items in the Krypt. Konquest mode should take you easily under 10 hours to play through.

Sorry Folks, there’s no more ‘Chess Kombat’ and ‘Puzzle Kombat’, but alternatively you have the kart racing game, ‘Motor Kombat’. It’s good for a chuckle and provides something different than endless pummeling of your enemies. You choose from ten super-deformed versions of classic Mortal Kombat characters and race in one of five tracks – all reminiscent of Mortal Kombat battle arenas. When speeding around the track you collect red Koins (used to unlock items), green lighting bolts (a short speed boost), and gold stars (character specific ability, such as ice projectiles which freeze your opponents for Sub-Zero), all the while navigating yourself around ‘fatality’-inducing traps, like falling icicles or spike pits.

Online play consists of the standard one-on-one Kombat mode as well as eight-player Motor Kombat. In standard one-on-one Kombat you can use your personally created fighters to make things more interesting. The single option you are presented with when creating an online game is whether or not to allow custom fighters online.

The Krypt, as mentioned earlier, is where you view all the unlockable items. Most items are unlocked through the Konquest mode when you collect items, but they can also be unlocked by Koins that you have collected from the various game modes. There are heaps of unlockable items, 280 in all. This does not compare to previous titles which had 676 and 400 unlockable items, although who’s complaining?

The graphics are nothing new and are not all that distinguishable from the game’s predecessors, except for maybe some extra attention to particles and additional detail to some levels/stages.

The voice acting is sub-standard; you can actually watch video clips located in the Krypt of MK staff members lending their “talented” voice acting skills for the game. However, the impressive weapon sounds, full-contact hits, and gloomy music make up for it.

Fifteen years and two previous Mortal Kombat titles on consoles, Midway has released Mortal Kombat: Armageddon as what could be seen as a send off to the current generation of systems. But is it all that and a bag of potato chips? Maybe. I’m sure the hardcore Mortal Kombat fans will love it.

Personally, I’m not all that impressed; though don’t get me wrong, it is fun playing the goriest fighting game franchise. It just doesn’t go that extra mile. The new ‘Kreate-A-Fatality’ removes the quick and gruesome character specific fatalities which I loved. ‘Kreate-A-Fighter’ and ‘Motor Kombat’ didn’t get my heart racing, but the ‘Konquest’ mode was well put together. 

The makers seemed to go for the quantity-over-quality approach, in turn producing a game with a long-lifespan (which is the only good thing that comes from this approach). In the end, I believe it is all that, but the bag of potato chips? Not quite.

Game: Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
System: PS2
Players: 1-8
Online: Yes
Developer: Midway/KreativeKilling
Distributor: Red-Ant

Rating: 75%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)