Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance: I'm not the biggest fan of fighting games as most of them are pretty dull in my opinion. Some are obviously well made games, but what other genre features game play that comprises 30 second snippets of button mashing? Games like Streetfighter, Soul Caliber etc are, in my opinion, boring memory tests that offer little in the way of fun - either in single or multiplayer modes. Of course, some will disagree but that's a bonus of living in a democracy.

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is the 5th Mortal Kombat in the series (8th if you count MK: Trilogy, MK: Gold and MK: Mythologies), yet it seems as though Midway haven't really learnt much from the better fighters that have emerged since the original Kombat in 93. The only major difference between the first game and this is the move from 2D sprites to 3D polygonal characters and arenas. This doesn't really give the game any advantage as it plays exactly the same as it always has done - badly.

Back in the day, Mortal Kombat wooed gamers with its realistic digitized characters and outrageous gore. The game play was secondary. It's the same here, but the graphics are pretty poor (PS1 quality) so what do you have left? A boring, sad excuse for a game that tries to be clever by having characters that can adopt different fighting styles at the touch of a button. It's an interesting concept (Koncept?!) but just doesn't work, and neither does the 'Konquest' single player mode where you travel around kicking butt. It's nowhere near as in-depth as the adventure mode in Soul Caliber and is just a waste of time. You collect 'Kombat Koins' (what?!) by winning fights that can then be spent on items in the shop. Yawn.

It's like this: Deadly alliance is turgid. The graphics are absolutely laughable on a console as powerful as the Xbox, the game play is disjointed and the fights just do not flow. Rather than having a colossal battle between a Thunder God and a towering cyborg with lightning and stuff, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is more like watching two Thunderbirds puppets having a scrap.