Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"All it's cracked up to be"

First Off I have to say the only reason I am reviewing this on the Playstation 2 is because in Europe this game never came out on the Gamecube which was the version I wanted, since I pretty much had the collection all on Nintendo consoles and it also had the extra characters in the forms of Shao Kahn and Goro who I really wanted to play as, I may look to getting Mortal Kombat: Unchained though since it includes them and a further four characters from Deadly Alliance. Being the direct sequel to Deadly Alliance I really was looking forward to this game hoping that it would have a few improvements to make it the best Mortal Kombat game to date, and really it did just that taking everything from the last game and expanding on it, and making everything look that much more detailed as far a graphically although I find it slightly slower to play and linking combos together a little harder overall, but I wouldn't say that is a big problem overall. Overall this game follows the structure of the last game pretty much in everyway so unlocking things is pretty much the same, and gives you plenty of reason to play through the game with all of the characters at least once although there are also a couple of new modes which are pretty gimmicky yet still good for a quick laugh and break up the game a bit them being both Chess Kombat and Puzzle Kombat, neither one great but both decent additions. There is one big change in a game mode in this game and that is the Konquest mode unlike in Deadly Alliance this mode is no longer a straight forward set of missions where you progress as you complete it with each character, it is now an adventure mode where you take on the role of Shujinko and it fills in the whole back story of how everything came to be up until Deception starting before the first Mortal Kombat and progressing all the way, so it will have some good nostalgia in there and is a decent way of having a decent story in the game further expanding the deep Mortal Kombat story which now has to be the biggest of any beat-em-up going now since it just gets bigger with each game. On the whole subject of nostalgia this game really features it in abundance from the returning characters from past Mortal Kombat games and there are a lot of them that weren't in any other 3D Mortal Kombats so it is good to see them in 3D for the first time, and there is a few classic arena in there too which look fantastic and really like they have been lifted from the older games and that what they were supposed to look like so nostalgia all around in this game. Onto what's new though all the characters now have two Fatalities rather than just the one as in Deadly Alliance so that's something else you really want to see every one at least once, then you have the return of the Stage Fatalities but unlike in previous games where you had to perform a certain combination when you could finish your opponent these can occur at any point during the bout if you hit your opponent right something that for me really adds to the fighting as they can really end at any point, unlike in Deadly Alliance where you had the invisible walls all the way around the stage, although the stages in Deception are also multiple layers much like what they were in some cases in Mortal Kombat 3 so it really has went out of it's way to be a bit more like previous Mortal Kombats here and with great effect. The one new way to die as such in the game is to do it your self before your opponent gets the chance to by committing Hara-Kiri and killing your self not a bad way of taking victory away from an opponent in one-on-one fights. While this game isn't much different in most ways to Deadly Alliance it improves on it in just about everyway including some welcome additions and just as much content to unlock so if you do like the Mortal Kombat series you really will like this game as it's both new and original and nostalgic at the same time so well worth playing.