Review by: Jonathan Hynes
Published: November 12, 2004

Back when arcades still had a breath of life left in them, sometime around 1993, no game had a longer line than Acclaim’s Mortal Kombat II. Kids waited a solid hour to spend their lunch money in a futile bid to unseat the reigning champion. Skip ahead a decade and the arcade experience has been replaced by Xbox Live, and that geek who mercilessly throttles his competitors is now half the world away. The game itself has changed as well. Levels are much broader in scope, strategies are more complex, and the action is more frantic than ever before. What has not changed, however, is the immense satisfaction you feel after pulling off a fatality on a stranger who’s been talking smack all evening.

What has always separated Mortal Kombat from it competitors and imitators is the strength of its characters. The rivalry between Scorpion and Sub Zero and the metamorphosis of Shang Tsung are story elements that have stuck with me for ten years, despite the best efforts of the motion picture to make me forget. It’s appropriate then that the franchise has developed a robust story mode where you can journey with a young hothead as he develops into a lethal warrior. The adventure takes you through the light and dark worlds, chaos and order realms, and all of the other dimensions that coexist in the Mortal Kombat universe. Aside from guiding you on a quest from childhood to manhood, this Konquest mode serves primarily as a vehicle through which you can unlock many of the title’s secrets, and collect koins, the currency of choice.

Koins come in a variety of colors – platinum, jade, crimson, etc. – and quite literally pop up at different times of the day during the Konquest (story) mode. You want to pick up as many of the tokens as possible, as they prove quite useful in the Krypt, a massive Mortal Kombat graveyard. This cemetery contains hundreds of koffins, each buried underneath a labeled headstone, which can be dug up and opened for the right number of koins. Some of these caskets are empty and are meant to eat up your tokens, but most contain an unlockable component, from extra costumes to additional arenas and fighters. The reason for the color-coated system, then, is to give you a general understanding of the type and value of the unlockable, so you have some idea of what you’re purchasing.

Another somewhat unconventional method of amassing koins is via Deception’s two mini-games. Puzzle Kombat is similar to Tetris, though in many ways is even more strategic. Every block that you eliminate from your bar is dropped into your enemy’s and vice versa, though you both have a measure of control over how many fall at once. You can do it two or three at a time, but if you’re able to assemble enough blocks of a single color in a single area, you could potentially add three or four dozen extra blocks to your opponent’s bar. The other game is a variation of chess, where pieces move on a similarly constructed two-dimensional board. There are a few twists added, but the allure of this is in how your pieces interact. Every time you want to assume control of a square in your opponent’s possession, a classic Mortal Kombat battle is played out, with the appropriate handicaps invoked depending on the strength of the piece.