Mortal Kombat has been around for years and years. The franchise has put out an incredible number of releases — between console and arcade, the number is somewhere over 70. It’s an incredibly successful franchise and it has had both stronger and weaker moments.
Happily, the newest release in the franchise, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, in its Nintendo Wii incarnation, is a very good game. The game was released to the Playstation 2 and Xbox last fall, but with some tweaks here and there, it has just come out for the Wii, with, of course, motion-sensing control via the Wii Remote.
The main portion of the game, as with almost all Mortal Kombat games, is the head-to-head with the computer tournament (Kombat). Also included here is a relatively brief linear game where the player controls one fighter throughout (Konquest). There is a kreate-a-fighter mode and a demonstration video on how to use the Wii Remote to properly immolate your opponent. Plus, there is a racing mini-game (Motor Kombat) which is similar in style to a kart game like Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing, an endurance mode, and you can, of course, play head-to-head with friends either in Motor Kombat or a regular old battle.
Because everyone wants to know, there are, astoundingly, over 60 different fighters from the history of the Mortal Kombat games that can be chosen. It’s an incredibly wide selection of players, and even if many of them have similar fighting styles, it still is a lot of fun to go through and play as the different ones.
The ultimate question of course is how much fun is Mortal Kombat on the Wii and using the Remote. While it does take some getting used to do the special moves and trial and error to learn to get them right (the game insists you push the B button when starting a special move. I found that the move should be started immediately prior to pressing B, despite protestations in the manual that pressing it after the beginning would not work), it is an enjoyable experience. The moves can take a long time to get right, but general fighting is easy enough, even if using the directional pad to initiate the regular kicks and punches is a little awkward. Once you have them down, most moves and combinations can be executed fluidly, though there are times when executing a move on the Wii Remote fails to translate to it being executed in the game (user error, perhaps?).
Should one choose not to use the Wii Remote/Nunchuck combination to play, the entire game can be played using the classic controller. More serious aficionados of fighting games will probably have a better experience using the classic controller, it is the far more traditional route to playing such a game, and it does make initiating moves easier and more consistent.
Article comments
1 - John
Mortal Kombat isn't the only fighter out for Wii? Their is also Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2. It's hard to decide which one is better cause they both have their goods and bads.
2 - Ken Edwards
I said the same thing John, there is DBZ fighter. So I am editing the review.
3 - TV and Film Guy
My apologies, my information was incorrect, thank you Ken for fixing the error.