Mortal Kombat: Deception
Turns out you can improve on a classic series in a very big way.
Published: October 26, 2004
I seriously don't know what happened. Five years ago, I was laughing till it hurt at all the missteps and pratfalls Midway was making as they headed on a one-way course toward the demise of the company. I equated them with developer/publishers like 3DO and Acclaim, who were floundering at the time and are now six feet under.
Somehow, though, the company got back on track, and in the past year or so has recruited some impressive talent and has begun crafting truly engaging titles -- not just rehashes of old franchises, but seriously promising new games like Psi-Ops. Of course, with all those classic franchises, it'd be stupid not to give some of them a proper update.
2002's Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was the first step in that direction. Updating the tried-and-true arcade quarter muncher of years past would be no easy step, especially after two games that effectively wiped the glory days of the series from most old-timey gamers' memories. Still, the reinvigoration of the franchise was successful, adding multiple fighting styles, fantastic graphics, more unlockables than any game in recent memory and built upon the lore and mythology of a series that has been around for almost 15 years.
They weren't shy about killing off old characters either. MK mainstay Liu Kang was iced in the opening cinema. It showed that Midway didn't mind messing with a good thing -- if only to make sure the new more than made up for the lack of the old. The gamble worked, and Deadly Alliance was one of the better games of the year. The sequel, though, builds upon everything that it's predecessors did before it, and it does it better, prettier and more deeply than ever before, and puts it all online.
The result? The best Mortal Kombat game yet made. As someone who spent a couple hundred dollars and countless hours hunched over the first two MK cabinets (much to the chagrin of the parent), it's a little tough to say that, but nearly everything that the first two games did, [i]Deception does better. The sheer amount of crap you can do in the game, from a tweaked version of PC classic Battle Chess with booby traps and one-round fights to a Puzzle Fighter clone that actually does its inspiration justice to the classic one-on-one fights to the top of the heap to the returning Konquest Mode that tells the story of a pre-Liu Kang Earthrealm with adventure-style elements, all of it feels like a complete fighting game.
Of course, the actual fighting is still very much in the vein of older Kombats, and it's important to note this. Deception is in no way shape or form on the level of deeper brawlers like Virtua Fighter 4 or Soul Calibur II or even Street Fighter, nor does it really have to be. This is about unleashing high-damage combo strings, in very, very fast rounds.
That's not to say the original formula hasn't been tweaked a bit. For those that missed Deadly Alliance and it's main addition of being able to switch between three different fighting styles on the fly, this will no doubt be the biggest change. There are multiple fatalities per character, and it's actually possible to commit Hara Kiris to destroy yourself before you can be gutted, beheaded, eviscerated or just generally gruesomely axed by the other guy. There are also multiple environmental fatalities where you can blend, pound, explode and otherwise main your fallen foe.
There are a few more refined moves, like blocking high or low (though this will quickly descend into lots of low-block, turtling), and you're given the ability to reverse an attack three times per fight, but otherwise, it's about laying down huge combos involving multiple styles. This was especially apparent when we played online, where it seemed most of the technique involved low blocks and massively damaging combos that admittedly looked incredibly cool, even as they carved a nice portion of health off.
Deception's allure lies not so much in the fighting as it does in the wealth of things to unlock, and the addictive way in which they're presented. Deadly Alliance's Krypt, where literally hundreds of headstones hide a random assortment of unlockable goodies from concept art to movies to costumes to new characters, returns here in more or less the same form -- albeit stripped of a good 20% of the headstones from the last game. Throughout all the different modes in the game, you'll earn Koins in multiple colors (Red, Green, Black, Silver, and Gold) that can be traded in to unlock different headstones; bigger rewards will cost you more. There are also quite a few of these unearthed "koffins" that can only be unlocked by finding a key in arguably the biggest section of the game: Konquest Mode.
Konquest is a bit of a holdover from the last game, but whereas Deadly Alliance's version had you traipsing about an overworld map, the Deception version is a full-fledged sub-game in its own right, with a freely explorable world filled with multiple dimensions and a more slow-paced learning curve for the different styles. It's also the source of a pretty compelling storyline that helps fill in some of the gaps and smooth over rough spots in the admittedly convoluted and pockmarked MK legacy.
The other two big additions are probably the most exciting from a fresh gameplay standpoint. While neither are particularly new, the spin the boys and girls at Midway put on them is, and it makes for one hell of a distraction from the regular game.
Chess Kombat takes the familiar board, swaps out the pieces with fighters you choose (this comes in handy in a second), and adds in hidden traps (that will instantly wipe out an enemy who steps on them) and Green Cells that give the player that lands on them another +100 health, and all the teammates +25. There's also the element of sorcery, allowing you to teleport, resurrect, protect, kill, imprison, exchange and sacrifice once per battle so long as you have a surviving sorcerer on the board.
The pieces more or less move like they would in a real game (diagonally, horizontally/vertically, etc.), but to take a square, the two pieces enter a one-round battle, usually with the attacking piece at an advantage. It's an interesting way to repel attacks if you can overcome the deficit, and helps root the game in its MK roots beyond just the characters.
Puzzle Kombat feels like a cross between Capcom's PlayStation classic Super Puzzle Fighter and Nintendo's 8-bit puzzler Dr. Mario. Two-square multi-colored blocks drop from the top of the screen to the bottom, and can only be destroyed by either dropping a bomb on them (which destroys all the like colors on your side of the screen) or by hitting them with a breaker, which destroys any attached same-color blocks. Destroying blocks sends them over to the other side of the screen. If the blocks reach the top, it's game over.
The concept is simple, but incredibly addictive. The development team added a super meter that slowly fills as you chain block-destroying combos. When it fills, pressing square will unleash a character-specific attack against the other player. All the while the blocks are falling and combos are being made, super-deformed big-head versions of MK characters duke it out below. At the end of matches it's even possible to pull of Fatalities.
Throughout the myriad gameplay modes, one thing is abundantly clear: this is easily the best-looking Mortal Kombat ever made. The main Kombat mode looks more or less like the last game, with the exception of some absolutely killer environments that show a stunning amount of imagination. Crumbling clifftops, underworld foundries, an island sitting right in the middle of paradise and hell, and plenty of throwbacks to old arenas lovingly brought into full, detailed 3D all ooze with little touches. It's obvious that a ton of care went into crafting the different places where you'll be able to spill more than a little blood.
That blood still flies off of the impressively detailed, high-poly models in quarts, and runs in rivulets down arms, legs and torsos while the players fight. Faces get bruised and bloody, and as the rounds go on, the animation and lavish detail in both the characters and arenas they fight in continually evoke that "wow" factor. This really is one of the best looking games on the PS2, and four years into the lifespan of the system (to the day for us US gamers), that's saying something.
That doesn't mean everything's perfect. While the detail in the Puzzle and normal Kombat modes is exquisite, the graphics in Konquest mode look like something of a 128-bit tech demo. Extremely low-poly models and sparsely detailed, blandly textured environments rife with close draw-in and cheap fogging give the mode a hastily-rushed feel, even if there's a bit of depth to the whole experience. It drags down the presentation of one of the more lengthy sections of the game, and forces it into a feeling that everything is the same thing over and over again, just glossed over in a very basic way.
This is also a game that spends excessive amounts of time on audio. Punches and kicks smack with heavy, thumping impacts. Fatalities gush, snap, squish, explode and tear with gusto and the announcer still somehow seems to embody a little bit of rage, a bit of sick pleasure and even a bit of humor. Everything in the game feels like it has weight, from a simple punch to blending a guy with spiked arms, it all is a thick, heavy aural experience, and complements the game in a way few do.
Even the music, which ranges from basic to hummable, but isn't anything epic, does a great job of being original, vaguely Chinese or Japanese in parts, industrial, or subdued, and even manages to conjure up a couple light remixes of old tunes. The jukebox option, like all the other extras in the game, offers a bit of commentary from the composers, gifting a bit of insight into the whole creation process. It's not much (a full feature would have been nice), but it's more than nearly every other game out there gives you.
Let me get this out of the way for the purists out there. Mortal Kombat is still cheap. It's still vapid in the grand scheme of fighters, it still doesn't hold a candle to Namco or Capcom's efforts, but it is a hell of a lot of fun. It's also almost undeniably addictive thanks to the method of unlocking bonuses, the extra modes (entire days could be lost playing Puzzle or Chess Kombat, and that's just against the computer while you unlock stuff. Playing online is a whole new experience in and of itself.
It may seem odd to praise a fighting game that rests in the three foot end of the Olympic diving pool of fighters, but it's the combination of totally engrossing extra game modes, seemingly endless unlockables, an easily accessible mythology and the kind of passion and geeky pride that just rubs off on you. This is by far the best Mortal Kombat game Midway has ever made, and if their rebound from the brink of oblivion continues like this, we could be looking at a fighting franchise that continues to get better. If you've ever been a fan of the series, you owe it to yourself to check this game out, and if you've never really been into these games, consider this the best introduction you're ever going to get.
Somehow, though, the company got back on track, and in the past year or so has recruited some impressive talent and has begun crafting truly engaging titles -- not just rehashes of old franchises, but seriously promising new games like Psi-Ops. Of course, with all those classic franchises, it'd be stupid not to give some of them a proper update.
2002's Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was the first step in that direction. Updating the tried-and-true arcade quarter muncher of years past would be no easy step, especially after two games that effectively wiped the glory days of the series from most old-timey gamers' memories. Still, the reinvigoration of the franchise was successful, adding multiple fighting styles, fantastic graphics, more unlockables than any game in recent memory and built upon the lore and mythology of a series that has been around for almost 15 years.
They weren't shy about killing off old characters either. MK mainstay Liu Kang was iced in the opening cinema. It showed that Midway didn't mind messing with a good thing -- if only to make sure the new more than made up for the lack of the old. The gamble worked, and Deadly Alliance was one of the better games of the year. The sequel, though, builds upon everything that it's predecessors did before it, and it does it better, prettier and more deeply than ever before, and puts it all online.
The result? The best Mortal Kombat game yet made. As someone who spent a couple hundred dollars and countless hours hunched over the first two MK cabinets (much to the chagrin of the parent), it's a little tough to say that, but nearly everything that the first two games did, [i]Deception does better. The sheer amount of crap you can do in the game, from a tweaked version of PC classic Battle Chess with booby traps and one-round fights to a Puzzle Fighter clone that actually does its inspiration justice to the classic one-on-one fights to the top of the heap to the returning Konquest Mode that tells the story of a pre-Liu Kang Earthrealm with adventure-style elements, all of it feels like a complete fighting game.
Of course, the actual fighting is still very much in the vein of older Kombats, and it's important to note this. Deception is in no way shape or form on the level of deeper brawlers like Virtua Fighter 4 or Soul Calibur II or even Street Fighter, nor does it really have to be. This is about unleashing high-damage combo strings, in very, very fast rounds.
That's not to say the original formula hasn't been tweaked a bit. For those that missed Deadly Alliance and it's main addition of being able to switch between three different fighting styles on the fly, this will no doubt be the biggest change. There are multiple fatalities per character, and it's actually possible to commit Hara Kiris to destroy yourself before you can be gutted, beheaded, eviscerated or just generally gruesomely axed by the other guy. There are also multiple environmental fatalities where you can blend, pound, explode and otherwise main your fallen foe.
There are a few more refined moves, like blocking high or low (though this will quickly descend into lots of low-block, turtling), and you're given the ability to reverse an attack three times per fight, but otherwise, it's about laying down huge combos involving multiple styles. This was especially apparent when we played online, where it seemed most of the technique involved low blocks and massively damaging combos that admittedly looked incredibly cool, even as they carved a nice portion of health off.
Deception's allure lies not so much in the fighting as it does in the wealth of things to unlock, and the addictive way in which they're presented. Deadly Alliance's Krypt, where literally hundreds of headstones hide a random assortment of unlockable goodies from concept art to movies to costumes to new characters, returns here in more or less the same form -- albeit stripped of a good 20% of the headstones from the last game. Throughout all the different modes in the game, you'll earn Koins in multiple colors (Red, Green, Black, Silver, and Gold) that can be traded in to unlock different headstones; bigger rewards will cost you more. There are also quite a few of these unearthed "koffins" that can only be unlocked by finding a key in arguably the biggest section of the game: Konquest Mode.
Konquest is a bit of a holdover from the last game, but whereas Deadly Alliance's version had you traipsing about an overworld map, the Deception version is a full-fledged sub-game in its own right, with a freely explorable world filled with multiple dimensions and a more slow-paced learning curve for the different styles. It's also the source of a pretty compelling storyline that helps fill in some of the gaps and smooth over rough spots in the admittedly convoluted and pockmarked MK legacy.
The other two big additions are probably the most exciting from a fresh gameplay standpoint. While neither are particularly new, the spin the boys and girls at Midway put on them is, and it makes for one hell of a distraction from the regular game.
Chess Kombat takes the familiar board, swaps out the pieces with fighters you choose (this comes in handy in a second), and adds in hidden traps (that will instantly wipe out an enemy who steps on them) and Green Cells that give the player that lands on them another +100 health, and all the teammates +25. There's also the element of sorcery, allowing you to teleport, resurrect, protect, kill, imprison, exchange and sacrifice once per battle so long as you have a surviving sorcerer on the board.
The pieces more or less move like they would in a real game (diagonally, horizontally/vertically, etc.), but to take a square, the two pieces enter a one-round battle, usually with the attacking piece at an advantage. It's an interesting way to repel attacks if you can overcome the deficit, and helps root the game in its MK roots beyond just the characters.
Puzzle Kombat feels like a cross between Capcom's PlayStation classic Super Puzzle Fighter and Nintendo's 8-bit puzzler Dr. Mario. Two-square multi-colored blocks drop from the top of the screen to the bottom, and can only be destroyed by either dropping a bomb on them (which destroys all the like colors on your side of the screen) or by hitting them with a breaker, which destroys any attached same-color blocks. Destroying blocks sends them over to the other side of the screen. If the blocks reach the top, it's game over.
The concept is simple, but incredibly addictive. The development team added a super meter that slowly fills as you chain block-destroying combos. When it fills, pressing square will unleash a character-specific attack against the other player. All the while the blocks are falling and combos are being made, super-deformed big-head versions of MK characters duke it out below. At the end of matches it's even possible to pull of Fatalities.
Throughout the myriad gameplay modes, one thing is abundantly clear: this is easily the best-looking Mortal Kombat ever made. The main Kombat mode looks more or less like the last game, with the exception of some absolutely killer environments that show a stunning amount of imagination. Crumbling clifftops, underworld foundries, an island sitting right in the middle of paradise and hell, and plenty of throwbacks to old arenas lovingly brought into full, detailed 3D all ooze with little touches. It's obvious that a ton of care went into crafting the different places where you'll be able to spill more than a little blood.
That blood still flies off of the impressively detailed, high-poly models in quarts, and runs in rivulets down arms, legs and torsos while the players fight. Faces get bruised and bloody, and as the rounds go on, the animation and lavish detail in both the characters and arenas they fight in continually evoke that "wow" factor. This really is one of the best looking games on the PS2, and four years into the lifespan of the system (to the day for us US gamers), that's saying something.
That doesn't mean everything's perfect. While the detail in the Puzzle and normal Kombat modes is exquisite, the graphics in Konquest mode look like something of a 128-bit tech demo. Extremely low-poly models and sparsely detailed, blandly textured environments rife with close draw-in and cheap fogging give the mode a hastily-rushed feel, even if there's a bit of depth to the whole experience. It drags down the presentation of one of the more lengthy sections of the game, and forces it into a feeling that everything is the same thing over and over again, just glossed over in a very basic way.
This is also a game that spends excessive amounts of time on audio. Punches and kicks smack with heavy, thumping impacts. Fatalities gush, snap, squish, explode and tear with gusto and the announcer still somehow seems to embody a little bit of rage, a bit of sick pleasure and even a bit of humor. Everything in the game feels like it has weight, from a simple punch to blending a guy with spiked arms, it all is a thick, heavy aural experience, and complements the game in a way few do.
Even the music, which ranges from basic to hummable, but isn't anything epic, does a great job of being original, vaguely Chinese or Japanese in parts, industrial, or subdued, and even manages to conjure up a couple light remixes of old tunes. The jukebox option, like all the other extras in the game, offers a bit of commentary from the composers, gifting a bit of insight into the whole creation process. It's not much (a full feature would have been nice), but it's more than nearly every other game out there gives you.
Let me get this out of the way for the purists out there. Mortal Kombat is still cheap. It's still vapid in the grand scheme of fighters, it still doesn't hold a candle to Namco or Capcom's efforts, but it is a hell of a lot of fun. It's also almost undeniably addictive thanks to the method of unlocking bonuses, the extra modes (entire days could be lost playing Puzzle or Chess Kombat, and that's just against the computer while you unlock stuff. Playing online is a whole new experience in and of itself.
It may seem odd to praise a fighting game that rests in the three foot end of the Olympic diving pool of fighters, but it's the combination of totally engrossing extra game modes, seemingly endless unlockables, an easily accessible mythology and the kind of passion and geeky pride that just rubs off on you. This is by far the best Mortal Kombat game Midway has ever made, and if their rebound from the brink of oblivion continues like this, we could be looking at a fighting franchise that continues to get better. If you've ever been a fan of the series, you owe it to yourself to check this game out, and if you've never really been into these games, consider this the best introduction you're ever going to get.
