another life blog

A long time ago, I loved Mortal Kombat 2 with a passion. After Street Fighter, it was the coolest game on SNES and I mastered the sucker with a passion. Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks modeled itself after the classical game, and made it into a 3D adventure game similiar to “Double Dragon” or “Streets of Rage.” To start, you choose to play as Liu Kang and/or Kung Lao. The game is best played with a friend, because damn, it’s hard without a buddy to back you up. After some cutscenes, you begin to kick ass through some simple tutorials.

The game is really well made in my opinion. It’s not too difficult, in that when you are going after grunts, you literally can smack em around without too much trouble. The problem comes when the grunt’s buddies all team up on you. You go through the game, fighting all different kinds of monsters, and every once in a while, you challenge bosses like Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Baraka, Goro, etc, leading up to the final challenge against Shao Khan.

One of my biggest complaint about the game must be the fatality system. You build up your fatality meter, and when it’s full, you can perform a fatality. However, you can perform the fatality on any living enemy no matter how much blood they have left. So, a common strategy would be to build up your fatality meter, and then fatality all the enemies in the next room. Much too easy =( AND! You can’t skip the cutscene of fatality. It gets really old to watch Liu Kang punch the head off the enemy, then kick it into the enemy.

My second complaint would be how “free” the character can move. The characters face which ever direction you want them to, there’s no “lock-on.” But then, I guess that might make it too easy~!

My third would be the camera. I don’t understand why we couldn’t move the camera at all in the PS2 version! It gets so frustrating not being able to really see where we’re jumping to … it could be because we played the 2 player mode instead of single player mode… dunno.

Anyway, the real fun of the game comes in the versus mode. It’s really easy to pick up, and I had a lot of fun fighting against Po and Martin. Though, I guess it kinda gets old after a while… ah well.

It’s still a wonderful game to have =) It comes with MK2 also, but you have to unlock it. I was a fan of MK2, so this game really appealed to my senses.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.