A fighting game finally worth purchasing, with high quality gameplay and a sheer amount of content.
Adjusting to the Mortal Kombat world didn't take long. The characters are so distinctive in appearance and behaviour that it took a couple of hours and I was familiar with every single one. The story mode also helps this, giving suprisingly great character development to a notoriously shallow genre in this department. There's hardly two characters that look the same, and those that are similar, the way they fight would counter it. The balance of strength of the fighters is also extremely well thought out, there's certain folks who are resistant to an otherwise fatal move, and moves that are critical to certain opponments than it is to others. It gives it more depth in game, and feels fresh to discover these combinations.
The story mode is done really well, and certainly something for future beat 'em ups to take note. Made to full length of an average campaign (around 8 hours), it incorperates battles between movie clips to give it a true cinematic feel. The voice acting is professionally done, and for a genre full of corny cliches, Mortal Kombat is only cheesy when a certain fighter is supposed to be. Otherwise, a lot of drama and emotion is evoked throughout the entirety of it. The best thing about story mode is it puts twists in the fights you couldn't get in say ladder mode. You can go against a beefed up version of Shao Kahn (who by the way, is the most fustrating boss in any fighting game I've played), three female combatants, and robotic versions of opponments. It gives it a fresh feel, and makes it feel like an actual story mode rather than a bunch of clips thrown together with standard fights you could create yourself from exhibition mode. Each chapter is divided by different characters, so not only do you get a taste of what it's like to play the majority of them, but you find out each individual's background, who's their allies and who are their villains. The story gets progressively hard, so the learning curve is very fair and you can tell they have thought about casual players as well as the hardcores.
The challenge mode to me is the most addictive thingI have played all year. there is 300 stages, and each one are completely different to the next one. Some require you to do such things as use a fighter's projectiles to keep zombies from reaching you, some things like fight a hyper oppenment who's speed has increased 50%, some involve you to defeat an oppenment as the arena flips the more you hit them, taking health away from the character who's on the lower side. It's so fun and unique, and on many occassions friends and family who come over want to get involve (in the very later stages might I add), despite them never playing before. It will keep you going for hours on end, and helps keep you coming back to Mortal Kombat.
There's many other small game modes which I won't ruin, but each mode reward you with points, no matter what you're doing. These points you spend at the Krypt, which is a field of men who are awaiting to be executed, and act as your prizes. Each one you select, die in a brutal, grizzly way for you to recieve your prize. Strangely, its almost quite satisfying, and I would prefer if more games did interactive reward systems rather than menus.
The online is superb, and always keeps me coming back to balance out my kill/death ratio. There's tag games where you can use and extra controller, than there's king of the hill where players cummulate their wins to stay on the screen. Unfortunately, the community is hampered by "spammers" who can't seem to use the move list for combos, and you'll come across them more than not. Luckily they don't exactly destroy the experience and it's not in the hands of the creators anyhoo. However, the connection problems are, and will have you pulling your hair more than few times. If can overcome these annoyances, online is one of the best features in this package.
Overall, Mortal Kombat is the fighting game I've been waiting for for a long time. Wether you're a casual fighter or hardcore, the difficulty balances well between the two and there's so much content here that it's hard to feel like you've wasted your money. It might not be unqiue enough to win folks over who has never played fighting game before, but it certainly has a multi layered story and development that anyone can experience. Did I just go through an entire review of Mortal Kombat and not describe the high level of violence, dismembering, decapitated heads, smashing bones, knife thrusting through shins and gouging of eyes? Yeah.