Mortal Kombat Armageddon ends the series in solid fashion.
The most noticeable feature with Armageddon is that you get to choose from 62 characters spanning through the entire Mortal Kombat series, which all but 4 are unlocked. There are two different main game modes: Arcade and Konquest, and a side game called Motor Kombat. Arcade is mostly self-explanatory: you choose a fighter, fight your way up to the boss, and finally see the character’s ending when you beat the boss. With this arcade the computer will choose 6 from about 50 fighters for you to progress through and fight and 1 boss from the previous games to play as a sub-boss before you play the main boss, Blaze. When fighting through the arcade mode all of the battle locations are all unique. Some will have multiple levels, others will have deathtraps, and some will include both. A cool new feature is the aerial combat. What that is you can knock someone in the air and them jump up and knock them around a few times before going back to the ground. It’s a very cool tactic to use and as also very cool to watch. Something that is different from Deadly Alliance or Deception is that each character has 1 fighting style taken away from them. So now it’s just 1 fighting style and a weapon style. It can be considered both good and bad. In a good way it’s a bit less number of combo’s you need to learn for that character. Plus for 3 different styles for each character would make things hard to make each style different from one another. The only bad thing would be is that it would disappoint many players who loved having 3 styles for each character. Something else that has been taking a lot of criticism is the new Kreate a Fatality. In the previous games, after you defeated an opponent the announcer would say “finish him/her” and one of the ways would be a fatality. To execute a fatality you would have to put in a certain button combination and your character would finish/kill off the opponent in a very gruesome way. It was always a fun way to humiliate your opponent. That is all taken away and now you execute smaller “fatalities” in a sequence of events, which sounds better on paper. The main reason is that once you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it all. Nobody has unique moves to finish off their opponent. For instance Sub Zero can’t freeze an opponent nor can Scorpion use his spear. The Kreate a Fatality could have been a better addition if it was a side option to the regular fatalities to the game. With all that being said arcade mode is a lot of fun to play.
The other game mode is Konquest, which is the story mode for Armageddon. Unlike the Konquest modes from the previous games, which were boring and not much fun to play, the Konquest in this game is action packed and can be a lot of fun to play. It does have a convincing story as to what is going on with Armageddon and why things are happening but it is pretty short and may not be worth playing again unless you are doing it just to find the few hidden items you failed to collect.
The side game, Motor Kombat, is fun to play; in small doses that is. Motor Kombat is basically Mario Kart meets Mortal Kombat. There are these fun little tracks to drive on with their own different look and layout and a selection of characters you can choose from. You will hit little power-ups during the race: some will give you a boost of speed, others will give you a special ability your character can use, and some will give you Koins and you can use to unlock items in the Krypt. It can be pretty fun but sometimes it wears thin really fast.
Mortal Kombat Armageddon looks really good from a graphical standpoint. The character and environment details look great and you don’t experience any problems with the frames per second dropping. On the other hand, most of it is recycled graphics from Deadly Alliance and Deception, so people look almost the exact same as they did from the previous games. Hopefully the next Mortal Kombat game, which will be on next generation systems, will have newer, better looking graphics than this game did.
Mortal Kombat Armageddon also sounds great too. While playing you will mostly hear the sounds of kicking and screaming as well as some of the sounds the environments will make. For instance there is one battle location in a subway station, and while fighting you will occasionally hear subway trains go by. The sound in this game is really good and could possibly be better than the graphics in the game.
Just when you thought 62 characters to choose from isn’t enough, they let you create your own Mortal Kombat fighter, in Kreate a Fighter. Just about everything you can think of to customize your fighter, you can. You can customize their appearance, fighting style, weapon style, special moves, biography, and other extras like their voice and victory dance. If you really put time into your character, expect to put in an hour to perfect it to the way you want. Unfortunately, you can only create 1 fighter for each profile. The game only allows 8 profiles so if you only save your profiles to your hard drive you can only make 8 characters. Thank god for memory cards though, that will allow you to make more, and you will. An idea for a fighter can pop into your head at any moment.
62 characters in a good arcade mode, a fun Konquest mode, an enjoyable side game, and a Kreate a Fighter make Armageddon worth every penny. The game does have some ups and downs about it, but it is still a lot of fun to play.