When you consider it’s low, low price and the bonus of online play it’s pretty damn hard to refuse

User Rating: 7.5 | Mortal Kombat II PS3
By fishdalf | Review Date:
Mortal Kombat hit arcades in 1991 and with it came a mixture of excitement and controversy. Creating a game were you had to beat your opponent to a bloody pulp and then perform a graphic “Fatality” on them was bound to raise a few eyebrows. Then two years later Mortal Kombat II arrived and as much attention as the first drew, it drew twice as much. Providing new characters to beat up, new moves to beat them up with and new interactive environments which allowed you more ways to kill your friends than ever before, whether that was throwing them off of a bridge on to the rocky terrain below or upper-cutting them into a pit of spikes.

Now Sony has released the game on their network, courtesy of Digital Eclipse, and it plays every bit as good as it did all those years ago. It still features the original 12 characters, each now a classic in their own right. From fan favorites such as Scorpion and Raiden, to Sub-Zero who now has a few more tricks up his sleeve. Each fighter has also been equipped with “Babality” and “Friendship” finishing moves in addition to an all new “Fatality.” This gives the gamer a lot more variety when they’re looking to utterly humiliate their opponent.

Probably the biggest appeal for long-standing fans of the series is the new ability to go online, so now if don’t have anyone to play with, or your friends are simply fed up of getting pulverized, you can venture online and pit your skills against some of the best players in the world. There are a few hiccups though, for example: when you enter a match you cannot leave until somebody quits altogether, you also have no clue who you are actually playing because your screen name doesn’t show up, and to top it all off it suffers terribly from lag.

Apart from the online portion the game doesn’t offer a whole lot more in terms of new features. You can change the difficulty and tweak a few other things such as switching off blood (what’s the point?) but other than that everything else is unchanged.

The look of the original is recreated perfectly and runs at 720p, sadly that means you're also stuck with some horrible menus. Surely they could have smartened up the interface before release, especially when you consider that these are the same people who handled Ultimate Mortal Kombat III for Xbox Live - new menus and all. They’ve also managed to mess up the audio, the whole thing sounds ‘bitty’ and has a tendency to cut in and out at will, such amateur mistakes and gives the whole thing a rather sloppy feel.

Aside from a few flaws (probably because they rushed it for an early release) Mortal Kombat II does a pretty steady job at emulating the original, plus when you consider it’s low, low price and the bonus of online play it’s pretty damn hard to refuse.

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