I've always liked MK, to me it’s been the Evil Dead series of computer games. It knows what it is and it simply plays on it. After MK III I didn't play another MK game until deception, and Deception was very poorly made. It's highlight was the beginning cutscene, to which I still believe to this day that their entire budget for the game was spent on, leaving them with no money to polish the rest of the game. It was clunky, the fatalities were not exactly great but better then some, voice acting and story where god awful... but... I damn well enjoyed the game. Like a B movie, this was a B video game. There was a ton of content in this game that literally just kept me going and going, and the puzzle kombat game included kept me and my friends entertained for ages. My friends would literally come around just to play off against each other in Puzzle Kombat.
The game to me gave me an impression it knew it was crap, but did the best it could with the crap it had to offer... and just really entertained me. I loved the documentaries within the game and all the concept art. Armageddon though swayed me as it just seemed equally poor without the same amount of content, and I totally skipped MK vs DC because I knew that was a disaster from the beginning.
The latest MK game though takes me back to Deception, though with a significant improvement to gameplay. True the balance is shot to hell, with online mode throwing Ermac's, Scorpions, smoke's and Kang's all day long at my Stryker (who I did pretty well with sometimes :P), but what it lacked in legit competitive play, it made up for in one player content. The storyline... it wasn't brilliant no, but for me it was really fun. Johnny Cage made me laugh because they tried to make him funny and he really wasn't, which in on itself amused me and made him likable. The story wasted a few hours too, giving a fair few fighters some good screen time. My friend who hates fighting games actually enjoyed it too... up until the last boss which was a bit silly and hard to defeat but he did it in the end.
We joked how the characters all had the same height and build, but in spite of that you can see the developers went to work to try and revamp the series, and I personally like what they did. Backgrounds were pretty fun, the characters themselves I found pretty fun, especially Stryker. It was never going to be an epic game they wanted it to be, but the game is fun, and that is all I ever ask out of a game for my money. Its story mode, despite being mediocre really kicks other games in the bollocks for the immersion for the MK world. In every single fighting game, I only know about the characters personalities and backgrounds because of wikipedia, MK did it right by my book giving us a mode to tell a story of the game and the characters within it. It was flawed, but it was there and it was fun.
Fatalities do need some work though. Some of them were pretty good, but quite literally only some. The others were just the same kind of thing, a limb flying off here, a head pulled off there. They could have put more imagination to their fatalities. I did love the x-ray attacks though, but they should have had less power in them rather than taking half your health, and the counter special seemed out of place completely being worth two bars as well, just to get out of a combo. These were issues that really came out as a problem when it came to online play, but in the end I simply avoided online for one player and I wasn’t disappointed.
If MK want to keep their heads above water with their franchise, they need to start from scratch again I believe. The system they had wasn’t bad, but I think MK needs to keep ahead of its own game and completely update each time. A problem with fighting games, especially SC and Tekken is that there is too much rinse and repeat going on. I haven’t bought a Tekken game since 4 simply because I swear it’s the same movesets getting put in each time with a few extra characters slapped in. True can be said for street fighter, but at least they change the engine of combat each game (super, ultra’s not included XD). SF 2, SF3, and SF 4 are totally different games to their benefit despite Ryu’s constant unchanging HADOKEN!’s XD
But yah, going off topic, I enjoyed the latest MK, enough so that I kept the game and intent to play it again every now and then. I may even look forwards to the next one, along as it isn’t more of the same :P
