Maybe Mortal Kombat's best adventure game.
Shaolin Monks takes place between the first and second Mortal Kombat games, so you find yourself visiting many familiar locales, and you find out what happened to Liu Kang and Kung Lao between games.
Fighting is done with 4 attack buttons. You can access all the special fireballs and upper cuts by holding R1 and pressing one of the face buttons. Special moves and combos can be unlocked, using experience points you earn in gameplay.
Fatalities make a great show here. As you fight, a meter fills up. Once it's full, yust wit an enemy with the right button and you'll be given a few seconds to put in the combination. You get extra experience points for killing him, rather than just beating him up.
There are also some variants on the normal fatalities. Multalities are available, too. They require you to fill up your meter twice. Once executed, they kill all the enemies in the area.
In the regular gameplay, you move along a pre determined path, beating up all the enemies as you go. Everything is fairly linear. You may have to accomplish certain things in the game to continue, like throwing an enemy into a certain area to break a wall.
Weapons are available at certain points in the game, but they have a serious catch. They deal a good amount to damage to your foes, but you cannot block while you are holding one.
It all works well, but it's by no means perfect. There aren't too many enemies. You will find yourself fighting a series of endless clones over and over agian. They also seem to take an impossibly long time to defeat. And even when they are nearly deal, they will still get up and fight like they are in perfect health.
You are also restricted to 1 path, so your movement is very limited. Camera angles can sometimes be problematic, and can't always be changed to help you.
You fight just about all the characters from the first 2 Mortal Kombat games as boss fights here. Goro, Kitana, Mileena, Jade, Kano and the 3 bosses from Mortal Komabt II make appearences here. Boss fights are fought in the same way as regular combat is, but they all have a special Fatality that you need to do to them. They stand out as one of the best parts of the game.
Defeating bosses will give you a "koin" to pick up. These koins grant new abilities, which you can take back in the game to access places you couldn't earlier.
Co-op play is here, and has its benefeits. Some puzzles can only be unlocked using 2 players. There is a versus mode available aswell. The characters for that are unlocked in the adenture.
The characters' movements in Shaolin Monks are very stiff. They look alot like plastic models at times. The environments are reasonably well detailed, but nothing to write home about. Still, all the environments look very much like the places you remember from Mortal Kombat I and II.
No music was brought over from the original games. That's very unfortunate, because it would have been great to hear the sounds from the Dead Pool again. The voice acting can sound a bit cheesy at times, but it is generally good. Many of the voice actors from previous games return here, which is great to hear.
Shaolin Monks is pretty short. You can complete it in about 5 to 6 hours. Completing the game will unlock Sub Zero and Scorpion as playable characters. THey don't do too much to change the game, however. They are jsut new skins for Liu Kang and Kung Lao. But apart from that, there isn't really much reason to play through the game again. This is Mortal Kombat's best adventure game, but it really isn't all that remarkable.