A Legacy Redeemed
Mortal Kombat has had its ups and downs as a series - mostly downs, unfortunately, but it's always been a lot of ridiculous fun, especially when I was younger.
With this newest entry, Ed Boon promised everything would go back to the series' roots. Okay, so he'd done that before - what's new about this? Well this time it actually happened. And those roots were improved upon to make one hell of a fun game.
For the first time ever, Boon's team concerned themselves with making MK tournament worthy. While like any game, this has met with mixed results, it's picked up some prominent adopters, most famously, Justin Wong, who conquered the game's first major tourney.
As a result of being conditioned for the tourney-minded, this is the smoothest-playing entry in the series. While some of the animation is still laughably outdated and that seriously broken breaker system is still in effect, a majority of the game is tailored to giving players hosts of options to react to an opponent's opening, including enhanced specials and for the first time ever for MK, a super move system, in the form of the brutal X-Ray Moves.
One of Kombat's strong suits has always been story, and this one doesn't disappoint too much. Following the good guys' defeat at the hands of Shao Kahn at the end of Armageddon, Raiden zaps a message back in time his MK1 self to prevent it. This ends up creating sort of a reboot/not-reboot/alternate universe scenario, which I admit is kind of lame, but it works decently enough. The only problem I really have is how much of an utter dumbass Raiden has become through all of this.
Possibly the most impressive portions of the game, strangely enough, are the Challenge Tower and Test Your Luck modes. With Challenge Tower, they took all of the bizarre tests of feat normally restricted to Konquest Mode in the past, spiced it up, and give you 300 of them to shoot for. The only lame thing about this is the lackluster "reward" you get at the end, which was hyped up by NRS as being one of the most amazing things ever but is more like "meh".
Test Your Luck is by far the most fun multiplayer mode of any fighting game since Smash Bros. My brother and I spend hours playing versus match-ups with completely random and often entertaining results, whereas normal versus mode would become boring to either of us long before that. It truly is an amazing concept that I hope carries over to the next game.
One of the most base-breaking concepts of the game is the roster, which I happen to feel works well. Sure, I'm tired of seeing Quan Chi's bald mug pop up everywhere, but the roster is pretty much everyone from the first three games (minus Motaro) plus additional ones. I don't know what kind of back-asswards planet some people crawled out of where random douche nobody likes from Deception is more "deserving" of being in the game than Cyber Sub-Zero or Kratos, but they're here and they're not terrible. The game's also got at least 4 DLC characters popping up throughout the summer and free bonus costumes for some characters that are keeping me satisfied.
Ed and his team have pretty much hit a home run with MK, and I may be drawing a target on myself by saying this, but I feel it's a much better game than SSF4 or MVC3. Like Nintendo's Brawl a few years back, I feel this is a game that will remain spinning in my console for quite some time.
