Despite the longer load times and the absence of online play, Unchained makes a great portable fighter nonetheless.
The gameplay is still the same, you choose from a roster of, in this case 30, fighters to compete in ultra-gory head-to-head battles, utilizing each character's fighting styles, weapons and of course, the battlefield that surrounds you. Almost every arena in the game features a number of traps that, when you hit your opponent into one, has them flying to a different part of the arena. These zones are marked by yellow glowing lines, but there aren't just yellow lines in the game. The scarier red zones offer an instant-kill, sending whoever is hit into it into many different deaths, including falling onto spikes, flesh-cutting lasers, a sea of piranhas and even getting crushed or ground by machines. It's Mortal Kombat, alright. Not much has been done to update the gameplay, with battles seemingly slow for such a gory game. It's the same as before, you have all the face buttons representing a certain basic attack, and adding directional presses would alter the height or strength of said attack. Combos are also present, but these combos seem to perform all separate of each other. When stringing together certain attacks, you can make for a longer chain, but it doesn't feel quite as real as some games do it.
Besides the story mode, a number of other features make an appearance in the game, such as Chess Kombat which assigns your chosen characters into certain chess pieces that duke it out to claim certain spots. Also present is Puzzle Kombat, a puzzle game that affects how your tiny bobble-head fighters go about the battle below. All these features are interesting in their own right, and anyone looking for some comic relief or a little deviation from the completely gory battles can look forward to these games.
The game looks and sounds great, with the exception of the characters' faces, which seem to have just been taken from console models and squished (quite literally) to fit the smaller screen of the PSP.
Overall, the game is very good, with a good number of characters (but where, exactly, is Sonya?) and a interesting array of minigames that make good use of a whole UMD's capacity. Despite the longer load times and the absence of online play, Unchained makes a great portable fighter nonetheless.