Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
I am barely competent at MORTAL KOMBAT.
I play my fair share of games, and I think I’m fairly decent at them. But I will admit near-total shame at the hands of the online community in MORTAL KOMBAT VS DC UNIVERSE, and frankly, it’s the online that would keep me playing this. Once you’ve played the story mode, all that’s left is arcade mode, and since the only person in my house who would play is Toshi, and that ain’t happening for maaaaany years, my only option for replay on it is online. So far, I’ve been impressed by how many people there are at any given time, and just how willing they all seem to be to kick my ass.
I’ve played the film with friends now, in person, and with strangers online, and I’ve played both story modes through from start to finish. I think I’ve pretty much poked and prodded every corner of the game that my admittedly low-level expertise allows, and I’ve read a bit of criticism from various online sources. I don’t usually review games, and I think gamers want a totally different set of things from their reviews than a film fan does. They have to satisfy very different cravings to succeed. One is active, the other is passive. With a game like MKvsDCU, the question is simple: is it fun? And, yes, it is. It is ridiculous fun, with an emphasis on the word ridiculous.
Let’s look at story mode first. You choose to play either the Mortal Kombat version of the story or the DC Universe side. I’ve played both, and they’re identical experiences, just using different iconography for the characters. They both build to the same exact final boss fight, and the rhythms of the game leading up to that fight are pretty much identical. At the start of things, Superman does blasts Darkseid’s dimensional portal with his laser-vision, and it causes a bizarre explosion to occur. On the Mortal Kombat side, it’s Raiden’s final blasts against Shao Kahn that triggers the same sort of bizarre backblast. As a result, that dual reaction opens a rift that starts to merge the Earthrealms with the DC Universe. And because there are strange forces at work, everyone’s powers are in flux.
My favorite example of this in the story mode is the Joker suddenly becoming a badass who can fight. His reactions as played out in his chapter of the story mode are pretty much dead on for the classic interpretation of the Joker. He thinks it’s hilarious that he can finally defend himself using brute force, and every fight seems to just make him laugh even more. It’s nicely done. I can see why some fans find the idea frustrating, wishing they could just punch people’s heads off like water balloons with Superan’s strength, but that would pretty much render the game unplayable. They had to find some way to try to keep the powers familiar, but scale them so that everyone has some chance in a fight. The format for both versions of the story is a series of chapters, each from the point of view of a different lead character that you’re playing, each with about four fights in the chapter.
And at the very end of the game, you have to face Dark Kahn, who is a hybrid of Darkseid and Shao Kahn as one person. You defeat him as Superman and as Raiden, and when you do, you unlock both Darkseid and Shao Kahn as playable characters. Playing through story mode straight through took about four hours each time. You sit through a looooootttt of cut scenes, and I was surprised to see there’s no way to skip them. If you could, playing that mode would take a lot less time, and sort of defeat the point of having a story mode instead of an arcade mode, I suppose. The first time through, playing the DC Universe, I didn’t mind, but about three chapters into the Mortal Kombat version, I was ready to just skip to the fights.
If that’s what you’re looking to do, let me suggest the online mode. It’s very simple to set up a match, and I’ve been able to find people online any time I went looking so far. And either I have terrible luck of the draw so far, or I really am the worst player ever born. Every single time I’ve gone online so far to play, I have had my ass handed to me in rapid fashion. I’ve played for an hour or two each time, trying to see if it’s just a learning curve for me, but I continue to get shamed. I thought I did really well playing through the story mode, and I seem to do well on the Kombo challenge mode, where you try out different combos in order to unlock all sorts of things. But against a real person, I get schooled every single time. Pwned like a noob, if you will.
I’m guessing the solution is to play it with my friends at my place or at their place, but I play so few games with someone that I don’t even have a second controller for the PS3 right now. I think this would be a great geek party game for the crazy novelty of it, and I’ve really enjoyed the wacko head-to-head match-ups the game makes possible. It’s very much a Mortal Kombat game in control scheme and combo styles, with a few new mechanics thrown in. There’s the freefall Kombat, where you crash through a wall and ride your opponent to the ground in a 3D space, beating the shit out of them as you fall. That can be reversed, though, and you could end up taking damage that costs up to 30% of your health as a result. There’s also another event you can trigger where you throw someone against the wall, then charge them and run them through something like six walls in a row, mashing buttons to try to determine how much damage you do. It feels very familiar, though. They didn’t try to reinvent Mortal Kombat completely, and I appreciated that. The last MK game I played was MORTAL KOMBAT MYTHOLOGIES: SUB-ZERO, which we played when we started work on our script for MK3 back in the late ‘90s. I think this new game is a real return to what made Mortal Kombat so much fun in the first place, with one very notable exception.
I don’t think the lack of noteworthy fatalities is a deal-breaker, but I can understand how someone else might. Part of the kick of playing this series has always been the knowledge that if you somehow get lucky and hit just the right series of buttons at just the right moment, you’re going to get this crazy deranged gore-soaked cartoon death that you visit upon the other player. It’s humiliating to have done to you, and it’s awesome to rain down on someone else. It was a defining part of the series, and the licensing of the DC Universe characters defanged the series a bit. That’s just inherent to having all these kid-friendly characters involved. To me, none of the fatalities or heroic brutalities I’ve seen are particularly memorable. It’s the one thing it felt to me like Midway really botched. Sometimes, some of the biggest games out there can be dazzling and involving and technically impressive and cutting-edge, but they don’t end up being much fun over the long haul, and the fatalities were fun. I personally got over their absence, and there are a lot of moves that end up being just as dramatic and extreme, but just not as violent, so maybe you can as well.
If I could just make my 38-year-old fingers move as fast as those of a Mountain Dew-soaked-14-year-old who’s got time to memorize every combo perfectly, I’d be having a bit more fun, maybe, but if you ever feel like racking up a few easy victories, look for “MoriartyAICN” on the PS3 version of the game. MKvsDCU may not have the scope or the depth of some of this season’s biggest games (I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of LITTLE BIG PLANET or FAR CRY 2, even after hours and hours and hours of game play, and I know friends who feel that way about FALLOUT 3 as well), but it’s fun. And that seems to me like they got the most important part exactly right.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
