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 alternate between three different fighting styles, which allows the player to become a more dimensional and cunning opponent. Some combos even bridge fighting styles, which can lead to some devastating deliveries. However, the only disadvantage to this is, if you fail to deliver a combo, you are pretty much fated to accept your opponent’s counter attack. Also, for each fight there are three “combo breakers” given which allow you to stop your assaulting opponent in his/her tracks.

While I did find this game strangely addicting (Konquest mode, particularly) and creative, it holds more worth for aesthetic value, legacy, and the glory of its predecessors than anything else. While this game does have what it takes in inventiveness and variation to be an independent, stand-alone game, I would definitely say that if you’ve been a follower since the beginning of theMortal Kombat series, you will find this game to be more appreciable as part of a legacy (or heck, maybe even less so as a franchise). It’s definitely worth buying used and selling later on Amazon.