Somewhere along the line, I believe Midway misnamed their Mortal Kombat games. Mortal Kombat: Deception should really have been called Mortal Kombat: Redemption. After Mortal Kombat 2, the entries that followed failed to live up to its initial sequel in several areas. Mortal Kombat 3 sacrificed the serious (but not too) tone and solid character selection with a lame “so sick it’s funny” approach with a bunch of characters that had no real connection with gamers. Mortal Kombat 4 was the victim of the big rush to get all the big franchises in 3D. The result was a decent looking but stiffly playing mishmash of the franchise with yet again, more characters who just left us wanting more. Things took a turn for the better with Deadly Alliance. As a fifth title in a long running series, Deadly Alliance meant to fix the problems previous games set down, and ground the series into a fresh 3D setting. It succeeded in many ways, and sold quite a lot of copies, proving that fans were still very much interested, but overall, it didn’t pack the punch of modern fighting games like Soul Calibur and Virtua Fighter 4, which featured many extra activities to keep players entertained over long periods of time. Mortal Kombat: Deception essentially fixes “all” of this, and returns the series to its pre-MK3 glory. While it still lacks the overall depth of the current crop of fighters, its still fast, furious and a lot of bloody fun (take that any way you want). 

As fighting game, Mortal Kombat has done everything right, but as a story based fighting game, up until now, it hasn’t done much of anything to connect us with its world. You could argue that the movies that were released in the mid nineties helped to flesh out the lore, but while the first movie proved there was a background to be followed; its sequel completely squandered any hope of making people understand this “glorious” tournament’s purpose. Aside from the main fighting portions, Deception has added a “Konquest” mode, which serves as an Action/RPG of sorts which helps players to gain koins to unlock secret items with, and to give the story of Mortal Kombat a bit of depth. You play as Shujinko, a young apprentice of Master Bo Rai Cho, who is teaching you the ways of martial arts in the hope that you can one day stand as a champion for your home realm. For those that don’t know, Mortal Kombat’s explanation of the mystical aspects of the story comes from “realms” which are considered to be different planes of existence or dimensions. Throughout the game you are traveling through these realms to locate a piece of an ancient artifact while on a mission for a supposed “elder god”. While it seems generic (it certainly looks so), the story takes a nice twist towards the end that makes the experience worthwhile. The conquest mode alone can take from 20-25 hours to complete and then you can take your souped up and customized character online.

 

Aside from Konquest, the core fighting modes are intact. You have the classic ladder matches which allows you to play against a variety of characters. In terms of overall strength, Scorpion is one of the most used characters because he has several deadly and easy to use combos which go in a players favor. But the most fun comes from the various secret characters who provide much more in the way of challenge and variety. The one thing that has to be said about the classic mode is that the final boss returns the series to the trend of placing you up against an insanely cheap opponent (like Goro, or Mortaro). The boss isn’t impossible, but let’s just say you will be developing an entirely new fighting style just to deal with that one monotonous battle. 

For those that don’t know, the fighting engine has been tweaked a bit since Mortal Kombat 4. The introduction of switching fighting styles on the fly in Deadly Alliance has proven to be the most innovative addition to the series. Defeating characters will depend on your mastery of each style and ability to switch and perform combos while changing styles on the fly. The biggest new addition to Deception is the combo breakers, which allow you to turn the tide of a massive combo by breaking it off. This is a sometimes too easy command to perform which can quickly turn battles into a breaker match; luckily I haven’t seen many online who degrade to this. 

Normally it could be considered “filler” but Midway has included a few new modes that will appeal to the hardcore MK players, but also broaden the horizon for new ones as well. Puzzle fighter has been added which resembles Puyo Pop and Columns. It has you stacking different color blocks until you can get a key to break all of the colors in that group. Its an insanely addictive game for those that can handle its slow moving nature, and its actually one of the more enjoyable aspects of the online play, but the crown for that goes to Chess Kombat. Mortal Kombat’s iteration of chess isn’t far off from the legendary game, but it does go off on a few interesting tangents. Instead of simply taking over a square, when two pieces overlap each other a battle is waged in the MK fighting engine. It plays out like normal arcade mode, with a twist, in that both characters have been affected by several status elements, which cause both players to think quickly about their actions. On the board, things like healing and resurrection have been included to lengthen the matches. Both of these modes were clearly intended to extend interest in the game, and both in their own right, do so very well.