Written by Jeff Buckland, 11/25/2002
Played on:
PS2
It seems that fighting games are seeing a major resurgence this year. Soul Calibur 2 is in the arcades, and home versions of Tekken 4 and Virtua Fighter 4 are out on the PS2. And now there's a new Mortal Kombat game! MK4 was a disappointment to most fans of the series, even though it was the best looking iteration of MK to date.
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is very different this time around. The graphics are much better and are on par with the other fighting games out there. The gameplay has undergone some major changes that might seem foreign to veteran MK players, but they're overall balanced and fun. Each character now has many more unique moves and combos than before, which adds heavily to the replay value - learning a character takes quite a while to do. On top of that, easily switchable fighting styles and tons of unlockable extras make this the best Mortal Kombat game since MK2.
The first thing I'd like to say about the controls is that the PS2 dual shock pad is simply perfect for this game. Midway went a D-pad-only route for the PS2 and GameCube versions (I'm not sure about the Xbox version), and the D-pad on the PS2 is far superior to the GameCube's. Why Midway didn't just allow players to use the analog sticks on all platforms if they wanted to, I have no idea, but the D-pad works great on the PS2 version.
Midway has done a few new things with the controls in MK:DA that are new to the MK series. As before, there are the standard High/Low punch and kick buttons as well as a block button. On top of this, though, Midway has added a button for switching between the three fighting styles that each character has, and a button for doing special moves based on that specific fighting stance (throws, taunts, and dodges).
The ability to dodge sideways in 3D is also here, although it's not as easy to do as it is in other 3D fighting games. It's still very effective when you know what your opponent is going to do. To do these dodges, you simply by press up or down on the D-pad; that means you will have to use the diagonals to jump or duck, but it's easy to get used to.
Wow, Mortal Kombat has changed a lot. Everything here is brand new, including new arenas, complete re-designs of all the original characters, and a whole new blood system. The game's overall look resembles something halfway between realism and a comic book, but it seems that that was the point.
The female characters all have huge breasts that bounce fairly often, which is no surprise to me; it is simply worth taking the heat and having big jiggling boobs (which do generate interest and sales) over making them look realistic.
The frame rate in MK:DA is excellent, which hardly ever dips under 60fps even with tons of stuff flying around. Animations are very fluid, and in most cases flow together well enough. Combine that with the great-looking arenas, and this game becomes very pleasing to the eye.
Once you start playing, you will notice that the trademark MK blood is back and in a grand fashion. Connecting with almost any move will spew out more blood than ever before, and it now gushes out of the bigger wounds and rolls off of the character models' bodies. It looks really good, even if it is also looks totally fake. The other new graphical feature with the character models is that their faces will suffer from bruises and other marks when they are hit, which means that narrowly winning a fight will show on your character's face. I know, it's not exactly a huge deal, but it is a nice touch on top of everything else.
The arenas in MK:DA look fairly impressive, and there are little graphical touches all over the place that make it seem like Midway really took their time with this game. Several of the arenas are somewhat recognizable redos from past MK games or movies, and the mini-games even have a crowd watching and cheering you on.
Here we come to gameplay. The fighting game genre is probably the most sensitive to bad or imbalanced gameplay, which means that developers need to spend more time looking for those little things that could ruin the game. Midway knows this, and it becomes obvious very quickly that they have spent quite a while making sure the gameplay is solid and fun.
MK:DA includes a new combo system that, while at first seems like the much-hated MK3 "dial-a-combo" system, dominates the game far less. The first thing to note is that the combos require better timing than before, which means actually finishing the longer combos is going to be tough.
Even then, the most complicated combo is not likely to do much more than 30% damage, which means the game is more about outsmarting your opponent than it is about rattling off 100% perfect combos on command. The bigger combos are still there, and you will want to learn at least a couple of the basic ones for your favorite characters, but the whole system is more freeform than previous MK games have been.
As well as a training and arcade mode, MK:DA includes a "Konquest" mode that allows you to go through a mission system. On top of the 8 startup missions, there are ten specific ones each character, making for a total of 218 missions. These are mostly easy, although the final ones for each character will require that you do some silly 12-hit combo or something similar. If you fail, well, you can restart right from there, so it's not too bad. Still, there's going to be one or two combos that will take you a while to perform - even if it is just that one time.
One of the most impressive things about Deadly Alliance is that they have packed so many secrets into the game. You earn "Koins" by winning matches or completing Konquest challanges, and then you can go to the "Krypt" and spend them. There are 676 (26 squared) coffins to to buy things from, and these coffins are lettered from AA all the way to ZZ. Some of the coffins obviously have important things in them, as the cost will be far higher than the other coffins. Other coffins will contain some amount of koins, and still others will have hints that point you to the better coffins.
