Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance review (Game Boy Advance)

Screenshots don't do justice to how good the game looks. The backgrounds are a little blocky, but they scale and rotate as you move within them. There are a number of minor details to notice, such as shimmering acid pools, lava fountains, and reflective floors. A couple of stages are mired in brown or gray tones, but the rest of the arenas are for the most part colorful and interesting. The characters don't have quite the same richness of color as the backgrounds, so they seem pasted on at times, but this gripe is tempered somewhat by the fact that they move so fluidly. This is especially apparent when you're circling around your opponent and you can watch as the characters scale larger or smaller depending on their position onscreen. As alluded to above, there's plenty of blood and guts in this game. Every hard punch or slice with a weapon sends gobs of bloody goop flying all over the place, and there isn't a single fatality that doesn't have lungs, a heart, or a spine landing on the concrete.

The audio is good as well, although the music is terribly dull. In spots, the tempo is so slow and the volume is so quiet that you'll almost think you were in an elevator. On the other hand, the sound effects are superb and quickly make you forget the dreary music. The variety and amount of digital speech is staggering. Familiar phrases such as "Finish him," "Fatality," and "Test your might" are crisp and macho, as are all the grunts and groans that the fighters articulate.

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is by no means the biggest or most polished fighting game available for the Game Boy Advance. But that doesn't really matter in the long run, since the aim of the Mortal Kombat series has never been to compete on exactly the same terms as the Street Fighter or Virtua Fighter games. Deadly Alliance has just enough combos and reversals to make it fun, and the real stars of the game are the blood and guts you'll see during and after each match. That said, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance sticks to the spirit of its violent predecessors and is enjoyable on its own merits.