Mortal Kombat: Armageddon

[Guest clintcasey]

Well the I've had my hands on the game for about a week now so I feel that I can give an honest review of the new game. I'll be looking at each aspect of the game individualy as well. So to start things off...

Aracade mode:

The actual mechanics for the most part are mostly unchanged between this game and the last two. Each character, with the exception of Smoke and the large boss characters, now have a one fighting style and one weapon style (Smoke has two fighting styles, some of the guys like Onaga, Moloch, and Blaze only have 1 style). The odvious reason this was to cut a few corners and not have to do so as much motion capture work.

Arial Kombat is a nice little addition seeing as we're loosing a fighting style for each character, but not enough to make up for it. To realy take advantage of Arial Kombat you you need to be good at performing pop-up attacks and then jumping in the air. The CPU is completly incapable of using Arial Kombat at all until the difficulty is at least above 50%.

As far as cheating goes the fighting system still hasn't been perfected. Infinate combos have already been discovered for Moloch and Jade that I'm a aware of (that are actualy quite easy to pull off) and there are probably others too. Noob (who some have considered low tier in this game) also has a 70% damage combo.

Some of the new Arenas are prety nice but they also re-used some arenas from a few prevoius titles in this one too.

What realy saves Arcade mode is the fact that there are 62 characters all together and Kreate- A - Fighters that can make the tournament ladder real interesting.

All together I'll give Arcade mode an 8/10.

[BlackFlagg]

got it, good game, only thing I don't really like is lack of individual fatalities as that has always been one of my favorite parts of the game in the past

[Guest clintcasey]

For the Next part of the review I'll be looking at Kreate A Fighter.

This is one of the game's strongest features. With it there are many many ways to go with your characters. The process starts by first selecting your Gender, typically Male or female. Under that you can select a preset if you want. There are actualy several Pre-sets but at the start of the game you ony have one male preset (which is Shang Tsung with his MK1 look) and one female (A female tarkata). Next you choose the size, which is either Small, Medium, or Large and skin color at the bottom. The only thing you realy can't do is make a character thats overweight or fat which kinda bites if you trying to make E-honda from Street Fighter II. The other true limitation for Kreate a Fighter is you can only have one fighter per profile (although you can still have multiple profiles).

After that you can pick out all the attires for your character as well as some accessories. Classic Street fighter characters (with the exception of E-honda) are fairly simple to make, and you can actualy get very close on some of your old favorite video game characters. For instance I created a very nice looking Sephiroth on one of the profiles. I'll include all the formulas I used to make his apperaence at the bottom of this review so that you can make himself later if you want.

Fighting Style is the next on the list. If you want to make it easy on yourself go with a pre-set, but I wouldn't recomend it. This is the part of Kreate a Fighter that you want to spend some time working out because there are literaly hundreds of different options to choose from for each button that you press. I suggest spending some time on this and finding style options that work best for you.

Next is Weapon Style, its the same deal basicly but there are fewer stances to choose from as well as fewer moves. The downside to Weapon styles is your limited to Swords, Axes, and Hammer (which fall under the same heading as axes) so there realy isn't a whole lot of choice.

Next comes special moves, you are allowed 5 speical moves all together pluse a hold, but furthermore you can only use one speical move of each type. In other words you can have one Projectile, one charge attack, one disabling attack, one teleport attack, and one taunt move tops. You don't nessarly have to have any of them, but at the most you can only have one each.

You can also pick out voices for your character (although they usualy only use those for performing some attacks and taking hits) and their victory posses they do when you win the match.

You can also name your characters, Create a Victory Slogan (which appperes to your opponet in online play after you finish demolishing them), as well as a full biography that displays on the screen during your characters own Kata ending that is played when you beat Arcade mode with a created fighter.

Over all I give Kreate A Fighter a 9/10

My Sephiroth Formula:

Gender: Male

Preset: None

Size: Medium

Skin Color: 5,12

Face: None

Eye Color: 7,9

Hair: Fantasy

Color: 1,17

Helmet: None

Torso: Trenchcoat

Coat Color: 1,4

Shirt Color: 1,1

Cloth: None

Gloves: Leather Long

color: 1,4

Pants: Leather

color 1,4

Belt: Lion

Main Color 1,4

Symbol Color 1,17

Boots: Riding Long

Main Color: 1,4

Head Accessory: None

Chest Accessory: None (although you could go with the Bird wings if you wanted and make them Black. Sephiroth is only occassoinaly supposed to have one though so I left them off completly.

Arms: Layered

Color: 1,21

Color2: 1,23

Legs: None

Made the Nose width 2 shorter

Made the Nose Lenght 2 shorter

Mouth Width two from the left (almost as small as you can make it)

Lip size down about 3 or 4

Cheekbones, as far to the right as you can make them

Cheek Width 5 to the left

Jaw Width all the way to the left

Eye lids about 3 to right

Eye Angle about 5 to the right.

[Guest Takayamanofear]

Its not a bad game, I like 64 Characters but it just feels like it failed to deliver on what it should. Konquest is just a dumbed down Shalon Monks, the cool weird fatalities are gone and the Endings are very generic (no cool cinematics).

Motor Kombat is fun but is no Puzzle or Chess Kombat. KAK is good but I really would have rather they put the stuff that made the previous MK's awesome on this generation of console.

On a side note would any one else like to see a MK RPG style with the Characters of 1 & 2 where you choose a character and go though their individual Konquest Mode?

[Riceman 4K]

I'm sorry, but as an avid fighting game fan, this game is just god awful. The game is just broken as fuck.

[Guest BurnInMyLight]

I think shaolin monks was the highest point (most recently, anyway) of the series. That shit was sick co-op. But I'll prolly still buy this because im a fan. And a tool

[PkmnTrainerJ]

I'll probably get this when I can as I wuved Shoalin Monks, 'cept for Smoke lying to us PAL players!

[Guest We Are Robots]

As a huge MK lover, the amount of characters is orgasmic, and the return to mid-air combat is pretty sweet too. Complaining about Konquest mode seems totally silly to me, though, as even a half-assed Shaolin Monks style game is WAY WAY better than Deception's boring-ass "wander around and look for chests and do gay quests" Konquest mode.

The loss of the Fatalities and the third Martial Art sucks but is understandable, and I can imagine the custom Fatalities could be sweet. I'm getting it soon and I'm looking forward to it a lot.

[Hajjhowe]

My biggest complaint has to be the lack of individual finishers, which was really the biggest selling point of MK.

That, and Johnny Cage doesn't do the splits/nut shot. For the love of god, that is the greatest move in MK history.

Also the endings are just lame. I mean, at least the old games had pictures of cool stuff. This seems like a total lazy fest and you would think with this being the LAST MK that will use these people, they would try to make the endings a little more spectacular. Nothing is as dissapointing as reading about Johnny Cage becoming a monk.

Dissapointing, but could be fun in the usual MK way, and for the fact that there are 62 people to fight with. That's a ton of variety anyway you slice it.

Edited October 23, 2006 by Hajjhowe

[Magus978]

I rented this and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 on saturday. Between the two, MK: Armageddon was MUCH better than that steaming pile of crap EA Sports calls a sports game.

I like the Kreate-a-Kombatant and the Konquest modes. The Motor Kombat is also a nice diversion. Arcade is a bit meh for me. Blaze, even on easy, is just too hard. (Haven't played a MK game in a long time, so I started on easy)

Overall, it's a good entry to top off the MK games on the current-gen consoles.

8/10

[Rashid]

Very good graphics. Gameplay was alright, not as fluid as Deadly Alliance or Deception though. Love the roster. 60+ characters is awesome. Motor Kombat is a nice distraction but nowhere near as good as Puzzle or Chess Kombat. KAF is pretty good. For a first attempt though, I'm impressed. I liked a lot of characters endings, though many others were weird, bad, and wern't the best way to end their stories. Blaze was a very easy boss. Beat him with 17 characters so far. More times than any other MK boss. Being a Mortal Kombat fan for 8 years, I had to get this game. And it didn't let me down. I enjoy it very much.

8.5/10