Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
Midway's current-gen MK swan song is solid, but not perfect.
Published: October 25, 2006
KAF essentially replaces all the pre-selected moves from years past, which is a little bit of a downer (it always was fun to see how the Fatalities were updated), but trying to model all the moves for the number of fighters in place may have been rather difficult. Instead, when you see the infamous "Finish Him/Her" line, you can start wailing on buttons to begin tearing off body parts and smacking the opponents around, ripping out organs, snapping bones, crushing heads and so on. With every successful sequence, the window for stringing in another move shortens, so it's possible to leave someone limbless and in a pool of their own juices if you're quick enough.
Last year's MK entry, Deception offered up two rather enjoyable mini-games in the form of Puzzle Kombat and MK's own version of Battle Chess. Both were a lot of fun, and deeper than you'd expect, which is why I'm so bummed to see Motor Kombat be such a throw-away mode. Yes, super-deformed MK fighters are cute, and the kart racing tracks are built for speed, but they're lifeless and boring. You can unlock more stuff for this mode, but your Krypt Koins are better spent on main game and Kreate-a-Fighter sections; just one or two behind-the-scenes peeks are more fun than a couple hours of Motor Kombat, sadly.
No, the bulk of your time will likely be spent in the yet-again-overhauled Konquest Mode. Taking a page from the general design of MK: Shaolin Monks (though not nearly as pretty), Konquest is now a free-roaming adventure with it's own story. See, two brothers born from a Elder God and a human woman are racing to stop the Apocalypse because the constant fighting is threatening to tear the world apart and blah blah blah. It's a rather painfully bland story, but it's the only way you'll unlock the majority of the game's stuff.
While traveling through a handful of clichéd locales like temples, forests, snow drifts and so on, you'll find music clips, alternate costumes, items related to the characters and of course Koins. Lots and lots of Koins. Though you'll likely struggle through the half dozen or so hours of Konquest, it's at least a full-on adventure game with Taven, the main character, slowly becoming more powerful and with a nice mix of Arcade-style one-on-one brawls and a general melee-heavy beat-em-up-style adventure. All of the time spent here will give you some nice spending money, and you'll need it, because MK's now-infamous buy-to-unlock system returns.
The Krypt is indeed back, obviously, though it continues to be pared down from the original version's nearly 700 options. In a way, this is good, but Midway tried to at least mix up the process of unlocking things by having you drop cash earned in all the various modes in a dungeon rather than a massive graveyard. Now, by plunking down cash for objects embedded in walls, you'll earn more items, sure, but also a fairly extensive number of character sketches and programming tests, and nearly everything helps thicken up the storyline as a whole.
The main storyline, told through an awesome (and lengthy intro cinematic which you can check out in the [ps2media=948]Armageddon movies section[/ps2media]) sets up the reasoning behind having all these fighters in one place, but there is a bit of a problem. For starters, there are some ridiculously powerful fighters here, and balance is a bit of an issue. More pressing, however, is the fact that many of the characters don't feel that different anymore. Maybe it's the absence of individual Fatalities, or just the fact that, quite frankly, there were a lot of similar characters over the years. Maybe it's the loss of multiple fighting styles. The end result is that the roster doesn't feel as diverse as you'd originally think looking an an overwhelming amount of choices.
