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Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks
Written by Jason Craig
Tuesday, 18 October 2005   
Audio:
 
 7.0
Visual:
 
 7.0
Gameplay:
 
 8.5
Story:
 
 0.0
Replay:
 
 9.5
Score:
 
 8.2
Genre: Fighting
Players: 1
Website: http://mkmonks.com/main.php
Release Date: September 19, 2005
Rating: M
Mortal Kombat is back…and better than ever

I’ve always been a fan of the MK series ever since the first onecame out. For those of you that can remember that far back, it’s theone where you had a simple High/Low punch and kick combined with ablock. Remember trying to pull off the fatalities? The sometimesimpossible button combinations you would have to get exactly right in ashort amount of “FINISH HIM!” time. A lot has happened since then andwe’ll get into some of that today.

This latest installment of MK brings in some new features. There isa multi directional kombat system that allows you to attack opponentsin various directions. It’s not that simple you face me I face you typescenario anymore. There are some pretty killer weapons you get to pickup and use as well. The environments are much more interactive than inthe previous versions. No matter where you go in the game, there isalways a place to impale someone, knock them into spikes or off ledges.Now, onto the good stuff.

Game Play/Controls:
I was pretty worried about playing this on Xbox that the controlswould be over complicated with the two joysticks, triggers, X,Y,A,B,black and white buttons. To my surprise, even though there are a goodamount of specials and combos on top of your basic movements, I foundeverything relatively easy to pick up and master. If you ever forgetwhat a combo is or fatality, you can simply hit the pause screen andcheck there. In the pause menu you’ll find a list of moves that you’veunlocked or purchased through experience points. Especially with amovement extensive game like MK, it’s always nice to have something torefer to like the move list.

The beginning of the game gives you a nice brief tutorial on how touse most of your basic movements. You won’t be allowed to pass to thenext area unless you master what your current objective is, so makesure you pay attention. Nothing is overwhelming to remember, but at thesame time you don’t want to keep killing hordes of enemies andwondering why you can’t move on.

Specials were nice and easy to pull off. A simple pull of the righttrigger and the appropriate button led to instant satisfaction in thedemise of your enemy. As I mentioned briefly earlier, there is multidirectional kombat now. On more than one occasion you’ll find yourselfsurrounded by multiple enemies attacking you from every vantage point.Most of the time all I had to do was move the left thumbstick in thedirection of the enemy I wanted to pummel and away I went. Moved on tothe next one and so on. I did pretty well at keeping a group at bay. Asto be expected, it’s not foolproof. Fighting your way out of the middleof an angry mob of walking zombies isn’t the smartest idea and on morethan a few occasions, I found myself taking damage and wanting to getout of there fast.

InMK:SM you have the ability to earn experience points. The points canlater be spent on unlocking new specials via the pause menu. Earningthese points is pretty easy, almost too easy. If you really wanted toearn a ton of points right away, all you have to do is sit in an areawhere two to three enemies keep regenerating, get a good combo goingand keep it going to earn a ton of points fast. Performing fatalitiesearns you experience points as well. For some odd reason, brutalitiesand multalities as well as using the environment to finish off youropponents earn you absolutely nothing. The environment objects I canunderstand having you not earn anything. The brutalities andmultalities are a different story. They don’t require anything lessthan a fatality button combination do to them, so they should beawarded some type of experience points.

I couldn’t wait to try out the fatalities in this version of MK. Iwas also apprehensive with how difficult they could possibly be to pulloff. For starters, there is a fatality meter in the upper left handcorner of your screen. The more damage you dish out on your enemy, thefaster this meter fills up and you can pull off a fatality. You canperform a fatality on most enemies during game play, not just bossesyou have to face. Once that meter is full, you hit the white buttonwhich does a fatality stun. The game play will freeze and zoom in onyour character. From there you’ll have a limited amount of time topunch in the right combination of buttons to perform the fatality. Ifyou mess up, you’ll lose part of your fatality meter and you’ll have torefill it in order to try and perform one again. If you manage tosuccessfully enter the right button sequence, you’ll be give a littleeye candy for a few seconds while you watch your character in a cutscene decimate your chosen enemy or enemies.

Idon’t want to characterize MK:SM having non-linear game play. In thebeginning it seemed like there was an extensive set of maps that youhad to become familiar with. As you’ll find out if you play the game,it’s a pretty straightforward process. You walk through from oneobjective to the next. Most of the time it is a back and forth processfrom one area to the other. You’ll key in on that right away when youstart walking around and get to the next cut scene. That’s always adead giveaway that you’re on the right path. To be honest, I’m glad thegame is like that. I want to play MK because I want to go out and fightenemies and conquer bosses. I don’t want to have to go around andcollect puzzle pieces in order to reach my objective in this game.There is a little bit of search and find in the game. There are tokensscattered about which unlock more playable characters.

Onevery big pet peeve I had with the game was the save points/checkpoints.The save points were far and few in-between. You can’t save the gamevia the pause menu so you’re stuck either moving forward in hopes offinding one or backtracking and then saving. Either way it’s a toss ofthe coin. You move on hoping to find one before battling a difficultboss or head backwards, save the game and know when you turn it backon, you’ll have to redo things in order to get where you were. Therewere countless times I had been playing for thirty solid minutes, mademy way through a considerable amount of area and had passed difficultareas. Without an opportunity to save, I simple shut off my Xbox andrealized the next time I played it; I’d be redoing a lot of what I hadpreviously done. Now for checkpoints. They seem be there and then notthere when you really wanted them. Two examples for when I reallyneeded them. In the beginning of the game, I came to my first challengeof battling the masked guards. Once you learn their pattern andblocking of their attacks, it’s easy enough to beat them. At first, Ihad to try them a couple of times to learn the pattern. When I died,instead of putting me back at the entrance to the bridge, I got put sofar back I had to do that boss with the club over again. The second andmore frustrating example is when I was battling Reptile. I died severaltimes while trying to beat him. Each time I died, it put me back withthat oh so stupid snake area where you had to break the columns. Doingthat over and over again after passing it once, got really annoying reallyfast. I’m almost resigned to just leaving my Xbox on and paused until Iwant to play more instead of relying on sparse save points andcheckpoints.

Sound:
I have to say, I’m really up and down about the sound on MK:SM.Fighting sounds, environment sounds all were nicely done. What didn’tsound so hot is when the characters spoke. Raiden’s voice sounded likesomeone was reading a script right out of a book. It just didn’t soundright either. Maybe because I remember how he sounded in Mortal Kombatthe movie, or maybe it simply didn’t sound right to me. I quite haven’tfigured that out yet.

All the “excellent”, “well done”, “impressives”, where spot on andgave me encouragement to want to move forward and do even better than Ihad been.

If you happen to play MK:SM on a higher end stereo system, you’lldefinitely enjoy when the announcer says “FINISH HIM!”. That’s whatMortal Kombat is all about right there. That oh so perfect fatality.

Graphics:
The cut scenes and FMV’s in MK:SM were done right on par for theXbox console. In game there is nothing to really brag about nor isthere anything to fault either.

The one thing I did save for the graphics area is first the cameraangle. At first it is an odd angle to play at. Sometimes you’re movingalong and there isn’t enough environment in front of you to see whatyou’re about to fall into. There are two other camera angles to choosefrom. Close and panoramic. I was really hoping for a first personcamera perspective or a free camera so I could look around. I foundboth the close and panoramic camera angles pretty pointless.

Overall:
I really enjoyed playing Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. I dowholeheartedly feel this is the best installment in the MK series sofar. I’m not sure what happened with MK: Deception. We’ll just forgetthat was ever released at this point.

MK: SM will give you around eight hours of game play. Nottremendously long, but good enough for a title from this genre. Again,I want to fight and destroy my opponents, not spend hours looking for ainsignificant object to finish one objective.

If you’re a fan of the Mortal Kombat series, this is a definite buyfor all the new features it includes. There is also the Ko-op mode andtournament mode that will provide endless hours of reply value.