Ultimate Mortal Kombat
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Developer: Midway Games | Publisher: Midway Games |
| Release Date: November 12, 2007 | Also On: None |
The Mortal Kombat franchise has been around since the SNES/Genesis days. Indeed, it caused quite a scandal upon its first release, part of it revolving around the gruesome nature of the game and part of it revolving around the decision by Nintendo to force Midway to censure it on the SNES version. How times have changed. Now Midway has released its first Mortal Kombat game for the DS, although by no means is it anything original. Ultimate Mortal Kombat is nothing but a compilation of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 from the SNES/Genesis era and the Puzzle Kombat minigame from Mortal Kombat: Deception, although both with online play. Is this enough of a game to make Ultimate Mortal Kombat worth buying? Read on to find out.
Since Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (UMK3) and Puzzle Kombat are such different games, I am basically going to review each of them individually, beginning with UMK3. Graphically, by DS standards, UMK3 looks dated. It looks very much like a fairly exact port of an arcade game released during the SNES/Genesis era, but that is what it should look like, because that is what it is. Even the fatalities, the blood, and all of that kind of stuff look right for a Mortal Kombat game. So it looks accurate to the original but substandard by DS graphical standards.
The sound also seems to be arcade accurate rather than having been improved to DS standards, and once again, it is hit or miss which would have been better to do, to leave the game the way it was for nostalgic purposes or try to improve it to modern standards. I do have to side with Midway though and say that leaving in the original form is usually best, and seems to be so in this case. The one-liners sound very foreboding, just as they should, and the other sounds sound dated but okay. There is nothing else really to say about the sound.
Since UMK3 is a port of an arcade fighting game, the gameplay is fairly simple to understand. The four buttons correspond to weak and strong kicks and punches. When combined with presses of the D-pad in certain ways, character-specific special moves can be pulled off. One improvement over the original which is possible due to the two-screen arrangement is that the action takes place on the lower screen while the upper screen displays the input commands for all of the special moves your character is capable of. While for some purists, this will remove the joy of figuring them out on your own, the fact of the matter is that, for online play in particular, this will help even the odds a little for new initiates to the franchise.
Game modes are simple to understand. You choose your guy and then you choose one of three destinies. Which destiny you choose determines the difficulty level of the game. One thing sorely lacking in this game that has been in many fighting games released in recent years is a practice mode, which relatively new initiates, such as myself, could really have used to figure out the use of the character-specific moves. But those with patience can just as easily learn by doing, and those who are already used to the game will be right at home without it.
Should you not want to play one-player, you can play multiplayer against a friend over local wireless utilizing either single-card or multi-card play, or you can go online and play against an opponent somewhere around the world using the same four opponent selection options that have become standard for online-capable DS games. So how long this game lasts will primarily be determined by the multiplayer, since beating up on the computer will get old after a while.
And then there is Puzzle Kombat, yet another addition to the growing list of puzzle games available on the DS. As an avid fan of puzzle games, I was more than happy to see this mode included in this game as I had never played it before and it is a reasonably creative concept. Essentially, you try to wipe out groups of a same-colored block by laying a destructor block of the same color on them, thus sending extra blocks onto the screen of your opponent, the objective being to force your opponent to reach the top of their playing field before you do.
Graphically, Puzzle Kombat is on a higher plateau than UMK3, and it actually looks fairly competitive for a DS puzzle game, but I have one major complaint: the orange blocks and the green blocks can be very difficult to tell apart. Also, although it makes no difference to the game at hand, while you are playing in the bottom screen, the top screen will show animation of dwarfed forms of your character and the character of your opponent fighting, with blood and fatalities when a character ultimately wins intact. You will be too busy dealing with your game, but this is something interesting to watch if you ever have a second to spare, especially if you win or lose and thus get to see a fatality take place.
The same can be said of the sound: it is pretty good. If you are considering buying this game just for Puzzle Kombat, though, be warned that the sounds of the two characters fighting on the top screen do not sound appropriate for a normal puzzle game, so turning the sound off might need to be considered. That's not because the sound is bad, but just because it is so different from the norm. The sound is actually reasonably good.
I already pretty much described the gameplay. There are, however, a couple of other things deserving of mention. First, you can change the skill level of the computer players in the options menu. Second, which character you use will affect what your special move is when you fill your special bar by destroying blocks. For this game, you have the same three multiplayer options that you had in UMK3 also, and the multiplayer is probably the best part of the Puzzle Kombat mode also.
What then is the conclusion of the matter? This game will live or die on its multiplayer, particularly its online multiplayer, so if you do not have the capability of playing online, a lot of the luster of this game may be lost. If you have no way to play multiplayer at all, the appeal of this game will die very fast, and you would be better off passing on it since there is not enough depth to the single player. But if you can play online, and think you would enjoy doing so for either mode, this game may be well worth considering.
| Graphics: | 7 |
| Sound: | 7 |
| Gameplay: | 7.5 |
| Creativity: | 5 |
| Replay Value/Game Length: | 8 |
| Final: | 7 |
| Written by Martin | Review Guide |
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