Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
It’s what you expect – Mortal Kombat
Tags: Mortal Kombat: Armageddon Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Michael Hanning on Nov 6th, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Mortal Kombat: Armageddon (title page) | 1 - 2 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Fighting | No | ||
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Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is a hard game to review because most of what you could denigrate is there on purpose. Oh, the storyline is over the top and kind of ridiculous? It seems sort of unnecessary that you can tear a guy’s arm off or throw him into a pit of spikes? The game seems to be really flippant despite its over the top gore and doom-and-gloom atmosphere? Wait, this is Mortal Kombat.
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Armageddon rests on the vague plot that there are too many powerful warriors fighting all at once, threatening to throw the entire universe into all-out Armageddon. The Elder Gods implement a failsafe measure, which is…well, a tournament to earn the right to fight a giant fire guy on top of a pyramid. This is Mortal Kombat, after all. This is elaborated in Konquest mode, a mix of adventure game and traditional Kombat gameplay that sees you controlling Taven as he brawls his way through the various worlds and characters of Mortal Kombat. The simplified gameplay and no-frills level design probably wouldn’t do well as a standalone game, but it’s serves its purpose of funneling you from one fight to the next. If you’re a fan of the Mortal Kombat storyline it also ties up various loose ends, features plenty of cameos and will probably make you squeal in glee. On the other hand, if you’re that hardcore a fan of Mortal Kombat you probably decided to buy this game long before you read this review.
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Fighting here still isn’t on par with the latest 3D fighters of the Tekken or Virtua Fighter series, but is serviceable. Where the previous entries to the Kombat series offered you two unarmed fighting styles and one armed, it’s been reduced to one fighting style and one weapon style for every fighter in this entry. Except for a few of the more exotic styles most fighters still play roughly the same, for better or worse. The specials are all still different of course, and they play just differently enough that you’re going to honer in on a favorite character and learn them from the inside out to get the most out of their combos. The combos, thankfully, are no longer the 20-hit lifebar-demolishing affairs they were in the early games, but they’re still essential if you want to stand a chance. The game can be forgiven for not giving every single character a boatload of styles, they must have been stretching pretty thin – there are sixty two playable characters, more or less every single character to ever appear in the series.
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The easiest way to get to know a fighter from the inside out is to create him. With Kreate-A-Fighter you use Koins you’ve earned on moves, costumes and accessories to put together a custom-built warrior. There are limits to what you can do, as the generator is mostly about applying clothes over a basic physical model, but you can still spend plenty of time accessorizing a new fighter more than capable of holding his own against the series mainstays. What you can do with the generator has plenty for everyone, too – I ended up pitting a skeletal gentleman-boxer against my girlfriend’s schoolgirl She-Hulk. You’re basically limited by whatever you think is awesome.
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The stages have grown more interactive in a fun way – if you can maneuver your enemy into the right position and knock them against the stage border, you can knock them into spikes, lava, acid, giant crusher machines, et cetera. The animations are amusing the first time, but after the second or third the traps are just an easy way to knock out your enemies. It’s still a step up from the invisible walls and lack of interactivity of the past.
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There are plenty of bonuses here, of course. The Krypt has a boatload of alternate costumes, videos, hidden characters and everything else you could possibly want. Among these is Motor Kombat, a kart racing game where you get to play as one of ten of the most popular fighters. It looks good and handles alright, but every character only has one attack instead of an entire series of them. You might enjoy this one for an evening, but it’s pretty easy to see why they never tried selling it as a solo title.
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Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is pretty much what you’d expect from the game’s big blowout of this console generation. It’s packed with over the top violence, its own strange sense of gallows humor and everyone ever playable in the series. You kind of have to meet it halfway, but once you do it rewards you in a big way.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Over sixty playable characters + Kreate-A-Fighter mode. + Generally the over-the-top craziness you've come to know and love from Mortal Kombat. |
8.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Individual fatalities no longer part of the game - Fighting feels clunky compared to many other 3D fighters. - Nobody shouting "Toasty!" in this one. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| If you fondly remember the old Mortal Kombat games from your ill-spent youth, you might get a big kick out of this. If it's just a solid 3D fighter you're after, you may want to look elsewhere. | |
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Tags: Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
Posted by Michael Hanning on Nov 6th, 2006 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
