Feels broken and gets boring fast.
Nowadays, it's a whole diffrent era in the gaming world. Everythings 3D and everyone tries to make their game look the best. This is where many companies fail, and fail hard. They focus too much on the graphics and undermine their own demise by not caring about the story or the actuall gameplay experience.
This might take a while, cause I've got a lot to say about this one.
Mortal kombat - Armageddon. What a piece of rhino crap.
The first thing that comes to mind is the Fatality system.
When I first heard about it before the game was released, I felt the hype, i thought it was gonna be great, awesome and make the fatalities last in entertainment longer then previously.
I was wrong, so wrong.
The first problem with it is that everyone's got the exact same moves. There's no characteristic visuals or anything. You can rip the spinal cord with the head still attached to it, with for example Sonya. I mean, come on. Show some class or whatever, at least make some characters have their signature moves left alone.
You basicly just tap buttons and see what happens. Left, left triangle, rips off an arm, forward forward circle, smash the head. Something like that, and it gets boring so fast, I was bored after the 5th time I'd say. There's a lot of moves to do in the fatality system, but not enough, and the whole process just feels stiff and redundant. Well well, let's move on.
The number of characters in this game is awesome. Every character from every previous game, which makes around 50 or more characters, can't remember correctly, but there's a lot of em.
But, and mark my next words if you're a fan of beat-em-up games like I am, it doesn't matter that there are 50 or so characters in this game. It's very poorly done I'd like to say. Every character got so few moves to their desposal that after one fight, you've seen them all. Feels like I'm playing mortal kombat 3 again, only with better graphics. But wait no, the combos in mortal kombat 3 was cool and looked great, which it does not at all in Armageddon. The whole game just feels stiff, like stated. It's like they tried to release the same game since the first mortal kombat but with nothing much new other then graphics. There may be a bit more moves in truth then in the nintendo and supernintendo games, but it's not a whole lot, and even if it does, that doesn't say much.
It is time to focus on the gameplay, fighting system if you will, and put the graphics on hold for a moment. Fix it, or stop releasing more Mortal kombat games, it's getting embarressing.
Oh, one more thing that I'm gonna complain about is the story.
In the previous two games for playstation 2, Deception and Deadly allience, when you completed the game with a character you got a story along with pictures of your character which showed what happened after you beat the game. Rightfully so, great stuff even though most of it was obsolete when the next game was released, same thing even for the old games, except the pictures. You got a story nonetheless.
In this game, they downgraded it again. From being a text/story and a few pictures/visuals/etc they went back to only view a text like in the first games for the nintendo, but not only that. Ofcourse they have your character doing some random crap on top of a the pyramid, kata, or whatever it's called. "A show of moves, waving your arms around in the air to show the world how bad ass your moves are" i'd like to call it. Note the sarcasm.
Oh yeah, you also have the story about the two brothers, the Konquest mode, which is a let down. It's like playing shaolin monks, without the co-op, and without a decent story and without anything good about it at all, it just feels like playing some random guy running around punching people, without a reason.
One last thing about it, the part with the scorpion clan or whatever, and the flying giant skulls... what the hell?.....
It's like the only thing they focused on with this game is just how many characters they could have in one game, nothing else. The graphics are the same as the previous games overall so nothing improved there, the fighting system is the same as in the two previous games, but at least they had their own characteristic unique fatalities. Even the Konquest mode of Deception is better then this, and anyone who played Deception knows what I'm talking about, sure it was tideous most of the time, but at least it told a decent story, gave the series a new character and made you work hard to unlock everything.
Mortal Kombat Armageddon, don't get it if you played Deadly Allience and Deception. There's nothing new here other then all characters from all the previous games rendered in 3D.
I know I left out the Kreate-a-kombatant and.. *sigh* the mario cart look alike kombat cart or whatever it's called, but hey there really aren't that much to say. Kreate-a-kombatant is a sh***y feature which offers you nothing new, and oh, you can only create one character per memory card. That's nice huh? And I'm not even gonna say anything about the mario cart game.
Hopefully they will learn from this game that an over excessive amount of characters doesn't make a good game if you don't give life to them. The kreate a kombatant is a step in the right direction, but needs a complete overhaul to make it worth anything. And please, for the love of something precious, forget about these useless mini-games and focus on the damn main game. In Deception I found it more fun to play the tetris game then play the actual arcade/vs game.
I give this game a 6.5 because for someone who haven't played the old games like I have, could find this game to be great.
The idea of the game is great, the music is good, the sound effects are cool, the graphics are nice and there's a lot of characters to choose from. But if you play games like Tekken, KoF, DoA and similar games, you will find nothing in this game that will make you stick around with it for long. The fighting engine is too old and stiff to make it into a great fighting game, to make it into the kind of game it should have been, and was before.
Good luck next time, and I don't mean with this new Batman vs Shang Tsung game.. jebus.. have some dignity.