Mortal Kombat: Deception

"Don't take spelling lessons from Mortal Kombat, just play it"

Yep, after the big hit that was MK: Deadly Alliance, Midway is ready to keep this series going by releasing Deception. The big new draw here is ONLINE!!! They've also brought a bunch of new elements to keep this series fresh and exciting. Just don't go to a spelling test spelling combat with a K!

GRAPHICS: 8/10
The environments in this game are pretty varied and all destructible. The moves for all of the characters look pretty cool. All the characters look amazing. Especially the female ones (I luv you Jade XD). There is a lot of blood and gore. While the fatalities look pretty dang cool, there is an overabundance of blood in this game. Nobody has that much blood that they're losing when they get hit by just a punch!0_o The blood doesn't even look that realistic, but then again I can see why not, to avoid censorship from being even worse.

SOUND: 5/10
They still have the old announcer that was annoying back then, and is STILL annoying now. There is also an abundance of squishy sounds in this game. I don't know if that's supposed to be blood or not, but it's kind of creepy. The basic music is here that's been around through the whole freaking series. You'd think that with all the gameplay changes, they'd change their music up. COME ON MIDWAY!

GAMEPLAY: 9/10
Like last year's Deadly Alliance, each fighter has 3 fighting styles, and you can use all of them to royally kick their ***. And there are a lot of fighters to do that with. Returning favorites like Scorpion, Sub-Zero(of course) and Jade (Luv yu Jade XD). There are also newbies like Ashrah (girl with big hat), and Kobra (basic normal guy). There's even one character who died and came back (NOT SAYING WHO!!!!). There are however, 4 new things with this game. First, a ton of interactivity with environments has been added to the matches, including death traps like spike grinders, burning steel pounders, and a very very long drop with a sudden stop. The old fatalities are back, and better than ever. However, some characters now have a self-fatality called Hara-Kiri. This is where the character kills himself so his opponent can't do a fatality. Kind of cool to watch, just hope you don't need to do it. 2 new modes have been added: Puzzle Kombat, and Chess Kombat. Puzzle Kombat is like the old extremely fun Super Puzzle Fighter game. And yes, this one is also extremely fun. Chess Kombat is playing chess, but when two characters meet on the board, they have to fight in a match. This takes a lot of the strategy out of chess, however, as in normal chess you could have a perfect lockdown, but in Chess Kombat, you try it, get beat, and you're screwed. I didn't really like it, but I'm a chess enthusiast. The last big thing here is Konquest mode. Aside from the misspell, you can probably guess this is like an RPG. The main thing about this mode is to collect Koins to unlock things.

REPLAYABILITY: 10/10
And boy are there a ton of things to unlock. Aside from characters and costumes, you can unlock concept art, special movies, arenas, and even get hustled and buy nothing! This can keep you busy for a very very long time. Plus, the game is just plain fun.

MULTIPLAYER: 10/10
And the biggest reason of the fun factor is the ONLINE PLAY. You can play regular matches, Puzzle Kombat, and Chess Kombat online. The normal matches work flawlessly online. Puzzle and Chess Kombat can be kinda irritating, but most likely you won't be playing that online anyway. You'll probably be playing regular MK matches, and that's the best part BY FAR!

OVERALL (BUY OR RENT):
This one's tough to call. Fighting game purists will have a tough time choosing whether to buy or rent this game. Hardcore MK fans should and probably already have bought it. I suggest renting first.

FINAL SCORE: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/15/05