Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance Review

It’s been a long time since I played a Mortal Kombat game and had so much fun. I remember picking up the first game for the Sega Genesis and playing it all the time. My favorite character was Sub-Zero and I would rip other people’s heads off with his fatality. I even remember the code you had to input to have blood in the game! Then came the second Mortal Kombat which is, in my opinion, the best one. It had a lot more than the first game and that’s where all of the innovations came in as the other games only added a few new characters and more arenas. Mortal Kombat 3 wasn’t that bad though, in fact, it was very good, it just kind of lost what made past Mortal Kombat games so great. It became a lot more hardcore though and it was nearly as good as MK2, except it was a lot more different.

After that they just released remakes like Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and Mortal Kombat Trilogy. Mortal Kombat 4 is where the series made the jump to 3D and I didn’t really play that game because I thought it was really bad. Some of the characters had changed too much and it just didn’t feel like past Mortal Kombat games. Other fighting games at that time were also a lot better and time had changed, except Mortal Kombat hadn’t.

This time though, Midway has completely re-worked the game and changed it so much that if it didn’t have the Mortal Kombat name as well as the same characters you wouldn’t recognize it. It has a lot more features than before and the fighting style has been completely redone. It feels a lot more like Tekken or Virtua Fighter games as today’s fighting fans are more attracted towards that style of fighting games, except for the die hard Capcom fans.

The old moves are not gone though as Scorpion can still throw his rope and Sub-Zero can still freeze his opponents, but most of the moves are now button combinations or single arrows combined with a button or more if it’s a combination of attacks. In the past characters had like 2 or 3 moves, sometimes 4. Now, we’ve got 21 characters that each have nearly 50 moves across 3 fighting styles! There are also weapons which had been introduced in Mortal Kombat 4, and I have to say that they control a lot better than they did as you can perform a lot more moves with them and, unlike in Mortal Kombat 4, it doesn’t feel like it was added at the last minute.

The 3 fighting styles in the game are incredibly important as each has it’s strengths and weaknesses and you can actually link attacks between more than 1 fighting style to inflict lots of damage. Some fighting styles are strong and slow while others are fast but don’t inflict much damage so you might want to start with a slow but devastating attack to send your opponent flying and then change fighting style and hit him a few more times while he is in the air. There is a lot of variety and it makes for some differences between the fighting style in this game and the ones it was inspired from like Tekken and Virtua Fighter.

I’ve never been very good in fighting games except for Killer Instinct and since last generation I had stopped playing most of them because I wasn’t very good. I’m an old school gamer and I preffered older fighting games I used to play in the arcades and on my Super Nintendo. Since Mortal Kombat had also changed I was afraid it had become like the rest and that I wouldn’t like it, but I have to admit I had a very good time with this game.

First of all, I had to change the difficulty setting to Novice as Normal was too difficult for me. This game is really hard. I guess that when you get used to it even hard can be easy for some, but I spent lots of time with this game and I never got good at it. It is really hard! I always used to be an offensive player in all fighting games (that must be why I’m so bad!) and in this game you have to use lots of strategy as being deffensive is quite useful and you can now sidestep to dodge attacks. Your weapons are also very powerful but when you have it equiped you are also more vulnerable and every attack that hits you inflicts more damage. You have more range though but you have to use that advantage wisely.