Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance review (Xbox)

The standard modes you'd expect in a fighting game are present here. You can play in an arcadelike setting against a ladder of computer-controlled players, or you can jump into versus mode to play against another player. As you'd expect from a fighting game, the versus mode is the highlight, especially since the computer AI in the single-player mode falls victim to predictable patterns and tricks, much like in previous MK games. Konquest mode is a training mode of sorts, which teaches you the basics of the gameplay and then lets you train with every character in the game. The training for each character takes you through 10 different sections and will show you the basic moves for each of the fighter's three stances, along with special attacks and a good collection of combo attacks. The game attempts to convey some back story through text that is displayed during mission briefings in konquest mode, though the constant stops and starts for text breaks get in the way of the flow. Also, considering the importance that the Mortal Kombat series has always put on its back story, it's surprising that these elements weren't fleshed out a bit here--some speech certainly would have been a welcome addition.

The other major section of the game is called the krypt. The game asks you to create a profile before you begin playing, and profiled players will earn kombat koins as they play in arcade or konquest mode. These coins are taken into the krypt, which contains a little under 700 different coffins all arranged in a huge hall, each of which has a different price in one of the game's five coin types on it. The object is to earn enough coins to purchase the game's coffins. You'll find hidden characters, new stages to fight in, and new costumes for the fighters in some of the pricey coffins, but for the most part, the unlockable material is a gigantic collection of concept art, photos, and other such images. You'll see photos of the development team, fan art, shots from a Mortal Kombat comic book, and an absolute ton of development sketches. While the concept of unlocking that much material sounds like a fantastic idea, in reality, saving up only to discover that you've purchased, say, a fuzzy screenshot of the Mortal Kombat 4 character-select screen or photos of a Mortal Kombat arcade machine can be a bit of a letdown. A higher concentration of only the coolest MK curiosities would have had a much bigger impact.

While Mortal Kombat's long-standing slant toward packing in a ton of secrets means that we may never know about absolutely everything hidden in the game, we can safely say that each of the game's characters has at least one fatality. The fatalities in Mortal Kombat 4 were supposed to mark a return to the series' gritty roots, but it's Deadly Alliance that actually fulfills this promise. While certain fatalities still seem a little misguided--such as when Quan Chi simply stands on his opponents' shoulders and yanks their necks up a few feet--the game's graphics engine does a great job of rendering the series' short, signature kill sequences. Scorpion tosses his spear through his victims' heads and rips their heads clean off. Kano reaches into his opponents and pulls out their hearts--followed by several other vital organs, just to be sure. Raiden holds his enemy over his head and shocks the body until it explodes. These are as graphic as Mortal Kombat fatalities have ever been.

Visually, the game has a lot going for it. Unlike Mortal Kombat 4, which basically fit all of the game's characters into a rigid animation template with incredibly generic results, every character in Deadly Alliance moves differently. From fighting stances to walking animations to attacks, the game's animation looks pretty solid. The game's textures, which are at their highest quality on the Xbox, look great on all three platforms. Also, Deadly Alliance is great at spewing out tons and tons of blood. Each hit to a sensitive spot results in a small explosion of red mist, and especially bloody attacks cause blood to roll down the game's character models on to the ground below, where it splatters and stains throughout the fight. The only thing that stands out as weird looking is the game's collection of projectiles, which occasionally look like nothing more than colored balls. All in all, Deadly Alliance does a good job of bringing Mortal Kombat's distinctive look into 3D.

The game's announcer serves the same purpose here that he has served for other games in the series. Player names are announced upon selection, and you'll still hear him say things like "flawless victory." Still, aside from some voice-overs in some story sequences, you can't help but think that some more voice in the story sequences would have added a lot to the game's atmosphere. The basic voices used in fighting haven't changed much, right down to the voice talent used for some of the game's move-related speech clips. Scorpion still shouts "Get over here!" when he sticks someone with his spear, Raiden still babbles unintelligible phrases when executing specials, and so on. The smacks, slaps, and cuts of fighting sound pretty good. Mortal Kombat fans will be impressed by the music, which isn't identical to music found in other games in the series, yet most of it feels like it would fit perfectly in the series' older entries..

Mortal Kombat is a 3D fighter that doesn't fall into the same trap that some other games have fallen into when making the 2D-to-3D transition. It also doesn't play much--or at all, for that matter--like other 3D fighters on the market. What you're left with is an unusual fighting game that does a great job of balancing the classic Mortal Kombat style with enough new additions to draw in people who aren't completely familiar with the rest of the series. Anyone looking for a wilder ride than the one offered by Tekken 4's or Virtua Fighter 4's comparatively straightforward martial arts battles should definitely check out Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.