Mortal Kombat: Deception Review (Playstation 2)

Mortal Kombat: Deception is a masterfully innovative game, combining martial arts-style fighting and unique weapons combat. It features new and returning characters, new moves and combinations, death traps, breakable objects, interactive backgrounds, and ruthless finishing “fatality” moves.

While this particular franchise has been largely successful in its ability to innovate, it does tend to wane in the area of holding interest as most fighting games do. What saves this particular game from falling into a stream of repetitively stagnant two-player action are the side games, which would be the rather unique Puzzle fighter game (which is an odd evolution of the old Yoshi game for the original Nintendo…interestingly competitive), the Chess game, and Konquest mode, which opens a new frontier of action/adventure gameplay in the storyline. You play the character Shujinko, who travels across parallel universes in an effort to help the Eldar gods, all the while being frustratingly trained, as the game so progresses, in the central Kombat area of the game, learning different advanced techniques for combat. Each of these secondary games is a means to unlock all sorts of things, such as screenshots, extra costumes, designer artwork and the like, and more importantly, additional characters — each obtained through the acquisition (through puzzle and chess modes, as well as the Konquest mode by side quests) and expenditure of “koins”.

What adds great depth to the fighting techniques is the characters’ ability to…