kool game
Then came MK2, improved everything about MK and gave it some decent gameplay and introduced some of the best new characters the series has ever seen (Kitana, Mileena, Kung Lao, Baraka). It made the boss of MK1 (Shang Tsung) and the hidden character playable (Reptile), introduced a new boss (Shao Kahn), and upped the stakes of the first game. The fatalities were doubled, and a few joke finishing moves thrown in for good measures.
MK3 came and had nowhere else to go other than introducing new characters, most of which were actually memorable (Nightwolf, Kabal, the cyber ninjas). Sadly, many of the better characters from MK2 did not return (Scorpion, Kitana, Reptile, Baraka, Raiden) and the ones that did usually suffered severly in gameplay (Kung Lao, Lui Kang, Jax), making them not as fun to play. UMK3, the update, brought back more MK2 characters and made it a little more tolerable.
MK4 sucked, and I have a review for that so I won't go into it.
Now we have MK5: Deadly Alliance. It brings back Shang Tsung as a last boss (alternating with a Quan Chi), and unfortunately, Shang Tsung no longer changes shapes. So he's really not any fun to play anymore.
Ed Boon had it in him to kill off Lui Kang in the intro, thank God. Kang was a cool character in Mortal Kombat 1 & 2, but in MK3 and 4 he became an annoying little pansy who makes the typical "martial arts sounds" and does nothing else. After four games he deserves to die and stay dead; I just hope they let him stay dead and not resurrect him like they did to Johnny Cage (who has sucked since MK2).
Deadly Alliance sports a completely different fighting engine than any of the previous Mortal Kombat games. The multiple fighting styles is fun, though many of them are redundant and some just plain suck. The new characters are lacking in inspiration, and all of them have a feel like a typical new character you would find in Tekken or somewhere.
The midboss, Moloch, is more annoying than difficult--lacking both combos and strategy all he does is poke, and with his range its inevitable for him to hit you sooner or later. Fatalities cannot be performed on him, and as far as I can tell he doesn't have his own fatality either (despite giving him the option to finish you). Test your Might makes a return, and spawns a new minigame "Test your Sight" which is okay I guess. After awhile they get in the way.
Deadly Alliance is loaded to the brim with extras if you're into all that--the Krypt offers new characters, alternate outfits per characters, concept sketches, photos of the production team, MK merchandise, comic book frames, info on the stages and characters. Plus it features a two short featurettes--the making of Deadly Alliance and the History of Mortal Kombat plus a music video.
So Deadly Alliance has more in it than all the MKs combined; however, the actual fighting tends to fall short of the gameplay MK fanatics grew up on. It is a different game at its heart than any other MK, kinda of a strange marriage of Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur, but lacking the depth of fluidity of either. It never quite reaches the finesse of those games, but in its own way is still fun to play for a bit.