The gratuitous violence and buckets of spilled blood don't hide the stiff combat and poor gameplay...
I would pay up to: $10 (get it used)
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When the original Mortal Kombat came out, games were somewhat careful about showing blood and death in games. MK earned a lot of press for its fatality moves, and huge amounts of blood spilled by the fighters. However, the gameplay of the series was never really on par with its competitors at the arcade. Games like Street Fighter were much deeper. MK2 did make a lot of improvements, but the series will always be known for gore, not for great fighting. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is very much in this tradition. It's very violent, very bloody, but not that great of a fighting game.
On the plus side, there is a lot of stuff in this game. The character roster sits at about 20 fighters. Most of these are classic characters like Raiden, Johnny Cage, and Scorpion. However, there are a lot of new fighters in the mix as well. They vary widely. There's a drunken fist master who can trip you up by vomiting on the floor. There's a rather buxom Chinese woman who plays a bit like Liu Kang. And there's a Sub-Zero knockoff named Frost that retains most of Sub-Zero's moves. Each has three fighting stances, a weapon, and a couple of fatality moves.
Beyond simply fighting in the story mode, MK:DA has a "Konquest Mode." This is basically a training mode for each character where you'll learn their moves and engage in battles with a variety of foes. Doing this earns you credits that you can use to unlock new content.
The amount of unlockables is astounding. Most of this is useless, like unlocking pictures of the development team. However, some of the unlockables include additional characters, alternate outfits, and some videos.
However, all of this content doesn't make up for the lackluster combat. The days of Mortal Kombat style fighting are passed. Today's fighters are technical, fluid, and extremely deep. Tekken and Virtual Fighter are examples of this. In those games, each fighter has a wide variety of moves to use in different circumstances. MK:DA doesn't play like that at all. Fighting feels stiff. There are few combos to utilize, despite each fighter having three combat stances. You'll basically block your opponent's combo, use the same couple of combos over and over again, and perform a fatality. There's little skill involved in this game, and your characters just don't have the same agile feel like more recent fighting games.
The graphics don't help matters, either. There's nothing wrong with MK:DA's visuals, but there's nothing notable about them either. The backgrounds do vary quite a bit, but none of them are truly spectacular. Your characters look somewhat cartoony, and they do move a bit stiffly. The series' hallmark, buckets of blood, looks terrible. Blood moves in huge, slow clumps and looks totally unrealistic. The fatalities are nicely animated, but the shock factor is gone from them, and they feel unneccesary.
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance attempts to reinvent MK, but it basically sticks to the same formula as its predecessors. This may have been a good game five or six years ago, but the more technical fighters have upped the bar in how one-on-one combat should play. I would pass on this game.