By Gary Kearney
There are different types of surprises in life. There's the surprise of
noticing that your girlfriend has an Adams Apple or the one where you find
yourself going to school without getting dressed first. But then there are the
surprises that are good and you wish they would happen more often, like a
bonus at work or a group of cheerleaders moving in next door. Midway's Mortal
Kombat: Shaolin Monks for the PlayStation 2 was a surprise to me. Was it a
good or bad one you may be asking yourself...read on for the answer to this
question...
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| MK is still as bloody as ever. |
I’ve never been a fan of fighting
games in general and Mortal Kombat in
particular. I haven’t seen the movies and can only name a couple of the main
characters and that’s just because I follow video games not because I play the
Mortal Kombat games. So when this game showed up to be reviewed you could say I
wasn’t too thrilled. Well here’s the surprise, I liked it and actually had fun
playing it. I would say most of that has to do with the game not being a
straight fighting game but more of a hybrid between an action/adventure game and
a brawler.
Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (SM) starts with a cool CG movie that gives the
foundation for the game, though the story is fairly weak. The intro is at the
end of one of the MK Tournaments and shows that Shang Tsung is not a graceful
loser as shown during his escape where he causes an earthquake that causes Kung
Lao and Liu Kang to fall through a big crack and into Goro’s lair. This is where
you take over control as either Kung or Liu and fight your way off the island
and back to the academy. From here the story is connected through cutscenes that
try their best to explain why so many of the arenas from the past MK games are
all showing up. But given that there are some pretty neat
areas in the game it’s not hard to overlook the lameness of the story.
Part of my cautious nature toward fighters is due to the insane button combos that
you have to know in pull off the ultra-cool attacks. While there are some
opportunities where button mashers will be in heaven, for the most part you can
get by with more-or-less simple button combos. The basic attacks in SM are quick
attacks which are very fast but do not do a lot of damage, power attacks that
may take a moment to unleash but carry quite a punch to them, , launch attacks
where you kind of toss the enemy into the air, and throw/grapple attacks that
let you toss a bad guy at something or give him a nice tight hug. The control of
the game makes it easy to link any of these different attacks together for some
spectacular moves.
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