MK: Armaggedon's kontent seems to have overwhelmed its kreators, causing them lose sight of what makes a MK game kool.
Returning to the Mortal Kombat palette is the Konquest mode, which has improve in story and fighting, but had made the world more linear, making the whole adventure feel as if it were on rails, there is only one direction to travel and exploring is out of the question. Since Konquest is not the meat of MKA, it simply serves as a method for unlocking items, and earning MK currency, which can later be used for purchasing bonus content like behind the scenes videos and pictures, or alternate costumes for your favorite characters.
New to the MK world is Motor Kombat, an attempt at Mario Kart style racing, using special attacks or upgrades to your vehicle (unique to the character) in order to reach the finish line in first place. With only a handful of racers and tracks to choose from, Motor Kombat ends up tasting half-baked and unfinished. Racing around empty tracks with the occasional MK coin to pick up, is hardly worth your time or effort if you are hoping to unlock all of the Krypt content.
Fighting in MKA is relatively the same as it was from the last three MK games. Though in MKA, air combos have been given better attention, and the fighting styles which you can switch to in the middle of the battle are scaled back to only two styles, versus the three from the previous game.
Some characters have almost no ground attacks combos, and the attack strings available to that character hit the opponent at only 2-3 combinations, while others characters have seven to eight different attack strings that hit for a 6-7 hit combo. Where the unbalancing of characters may seem unfair, it forces the player to find strengths in special moves, weapon combat, and defensive posture in order to best an otherwise superior character. Read these next paragraphs with the understanding that I am, as a MK fan, venting my frustration for the pain that MKA has caused me: Those unique fatalities, which we all have grown to love about MK, are gone! “What was Ed Boon thinking” is going to be a question that repeats in MK fan’s heads for some time. Why the MK team decided to use “create-your-own-finishing-move” as a replacement for our beloved deadly sequences, is beyond comprehension.
Instead of taking the time to give each character their individual fatalities, the MK team decided to make a new system that is the same for all the MKA characters. When the well known “Finish Him/Her” cry is heard, a player has two options; they can either turn off the game, or endure the pain of watching the same finishing move that he/she has seen from each of the 60 other characters. When I saw Sonya Blade pull out the skull and spine of her beaten opponent with the same skill and quickness as Sub-Zero, I no longer saw the ice-ninja in the same light again. (I have made a list of possible fatalities for each of the characters in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon in my personal blog. Go and check it out to see how easy it would have been to come up with fatalities, even if we revisited some of the classics)
Thanks to the individual who got Midway to throw in Ultimate MK3 in the collector’s edition. It almost covers up the mistakes of MKA. Creating your own fighter is a new concept for the MK arena of features. It’s a great feature to give back to the MK fans who have been dying to express their killer imaginations. In terms of creating an appearance and style for your character, using free items or unlocked items, this feature does well enough to put some uniqueness into the gaps left by the rest of the game.
Finally, my biggest complaint for this game is the reloading of a battle after losing. No matter if you choose to do so or not, when you lose a fight your are redirected to the character select screen to, more often than not, pick the same character your were playing as when you lost. Then you’re given a repeat view of the future opponent column with Blaze in the background (It must be noted that if you choose a new character, you are forced to start at the bottom of this column), followed by a repeat view of the Vs loading screen, before you’re finally returned to battle. Games like Tekken 5 and Soul Calibur instantly restart the match when you answer yes to the “Continue?” prompt. Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is a game tailor made for fans who wish to see all their old favorites fighting against every other character from the MK universe. With the classic Ultimate MK3 in the collectors edition, and create a fighter option; MKA will serve as a temporary means of Kombat that will lose its strength quickly unless you are a diehard fan. Though, don’t expect to see awe in the eyes of your opponent when they are finished off by a predictable string of button mashing…aka Fatal Endings.