Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance

"Krazy Kombats Returns For a Krazier Kontest"

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance [MKDA] is another game in the Mortal Kombat franchise. Quan Chi and Shang Tsung joined forces to revive the lost army of the mythological Dragon King and take control of both of the realms. Having gotten this far, they already defeated Shao Khan and the previous Mortal Kombat Champion, Lui Kang [that's right, he's not playable]. Through his fear, Raiden [not Rayden anymore :(] gave up his Elder God status to turn into a solid state and call forth the Netherworld's and the Earthrealm's mightiest fighters. They are holding a tournament to see who will prevail.

Story 7
Not a bad story. It's a lot more complicating than past MK games, but not by a whole lot. It's good to see a character die and stay dead, although Lui Kang is one of my favorite characters. What surprised me was Kung Loa [sp?], his brother, getting revenge for his death.

Characters 6
The other characters aren't too great. Some obvious ones are there [Scorpion, Sub Zero, Sonya Blade] and there's some terrible ones that don't fit in at all. In MKDA, the character are more detailed. Sub Zero is an old-time and Shang Tsung looking like 30. The new characters are basically uninspired. There's a vampire-woman [Nitara], a fly guy, a foot action woman and a few more. Even if there were about 20 characters, I would rather see some old faces. Where's Noob, Goro [hehe], Ermac, Smoke, Sector, Stryker, Nightwolf, Baraka and some more great characters? Probably because of the size of the game and free space, but I won't get into that. Just want some classics.

Gameplay 9
MKDA has a very good thing to brag about, it's gameplay. The game is fast, furious, and has a large learning curve, something quite weird for an MK game. Every character has two different fighting styles and a weapon to use. This adds a lot of replay to it. To master every style for every character is close to impossible. Another cool feature in MKDA is that you can start a combo and switch the fighting styles half way and keep on going. Talking about combos, they take some time to master. Some of them remind me of the other MK games, long and very tough. I was stuck on one of the combos in Konquest Mode for about a half an hour. Konquest Mode is a practice mode to get Kurrency and to get used to the character. It's long, but I'll take about that later. Arcade is what you'd expect from an MK game, but they aren't displayed in towers! If your a classic fan, you'll know what I mean.

Graphics 9
MKDA displays some very good character animation with pretty accurate fighting styles. If you switch your style you can easily tell which one it is. The weapons are good too, from twin daggers to ninja swords. What brought the score down was because of some of the character designs and because of jaggies. The background arenas aren't great, usually by it's design. The have some good detail like cracks in the tiles but the distance isn't great. In the background, you can see the main part and beyond that a great deal of fog. The developers got messy on that probably because of the detail in the character stances and just plain out detail. A little bit of a mixed bag, but far superior to most games.

Sound 6
Just okay. Nothing memorable [that's new]. The basic sounds from the MK series is all there, from the ''ughs'' to the screaming, nothing great. Something weird is that Sonya sounds Asian, but she's from USA. I won't go too far into detail into this. If you've heard the other games, you've heard this game.

Controls 9
MKDA has great controls. Some of the obvious flaws is that sometimes the switch in between combos [pressing L and continuing combo] doesn't work as fast as you want it to. Once you get used to it, it works like a charm. The blocking is right on. When you let go of R, you let go of it. If your using the S controller, you'll be thankful that you got it. You can live without it, but it works so much better. A letdown is that you can't use the analog stick. Once you get started, you wouldn't change if you had the chance.

Replay 9
Second to last part on this review. Simply put, this game will last a while. Arcade mode is standard fare with what you'd expect. Luckily, MKDA has Novice, Easy, Normal, Hard and I think Insane. Even on Novice, I found myself losing to Moloch [a sub boss] multiple times. In other words, this games difficulty is cranked way up. To win, you'll have to master the combos, fighting styles, and the weapons. Using cheap tricks like in before [projectiles] won't work so easily. Luckily, there's a practice mode to help your fighting skills. Konquest Mode is a training mode. You first go through 10 basic trainings that can be used by everyone. Then, each character has 10 ''missions'' to complete in a total of a whooping 128 missions. Talking about replay. But when you finished it with a character, you can't do it again. In Konquest, you get Kurency to get hidden goodies like characters, stages, extras like videos, box art, and even more koins. Be careful, some are empty. There's a total of 676 krypts [where the goodies are held] and a few different koins [gold, platinum, etc]. This will last a while.

Closure
Being a hard core fan, I found myself disappointed by some things. I'd like to have seen some classic characters, classic stages, and that ''Toasty!'' guy. Also, the lack of Fatalities is disappointing. Each character only has 1 Fatality [What!?] and there's no Stage Fatalities, Babalities, Animalities or Friendships. But still, a very good game that no one should miss.

Rent or Buy: Definitely buy.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/30/02, Updated 11/30/02