While Mortal Kombat fans are highly anticipating the new Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, Midway has released the Mortal Kombat Kollection to tide you over. This collection features the last three titles in the Mortal Kombat Universe, Deception, Shaolin Monks, and Armageddon. Deception and Armageddon are your standard fighting game and Shaolin Monks is an action-adventure game.

Looking at the first game in the bundle, Mortal Kombat Deception, the first thing that strikes me is the excellent opening cutscene when you load up the game. Usually the story in a fighting game isn’t anything to write home about however the opening sets up the game’s storyline nicely. Moving onto the game itself, for those who haven’t tried out the reinvented Mortal Kombat that started with Deadly Alliance, while stays true to the original games however they aren’t quite the same. They have made great efforts to modernize the fighting system unlike other games such as Street Fighter which has essentially kept the same gameplay with slight tweaks to the formula. They have "borrowed" aspects from other 3d fighting games such as the weapons combat that you’d find a Soul Calibur. How Mortal Kombat incorporates the new fighting system is by dividing up the different kinds of moves into three different fighting styles for each character. Each different fighting style feels fairly different from the other and you switch from each quite quickly. So you can pick whichever one you feel most comfortable with at any given time. The jumping in the game is fairly useless except for some dodges since you don’t get much distance from the ground. The gameplay is overall quite solid and if you liked the classic Mortal Kombat games and you comfortable playing your standard 3d fighter than you’ll probably like the fighting system. The stages themselves feature interactive segments where you could either kill your opponent by driving them over an edge to certain doom or just it just does damage to them. This is fun though the same you’d find in Dead or Alive. The game features 26 different playable characters to choose, a fairly average number in fighting games. The game has a single player mode called Konquest; however you’d be best to avoid it. The Konquest is a shallow experience that just gives you just a crappy interface to play the fighting with little enjoyment except for unlocking items. Some quite enjoyable bonus games are included in Deception in form of Chess Kombat and Puzzle Kombat. Chess Kombat is the MK version of you guessed it, Chess. While the rules aren’t quite exactly the same however its fun, especially since where in chess you normally you would normally just capture the piece, here you must battle it in Mortal Kombat where different stats are taken into account for the fights. Overall Deception is a decent game and a good addition to the package save some flaws.
This next leads us to the following game Shaolin Monks which is a departure from your standard Mortal Kombat experience. This game much like Deception gives you an impressive opening cutscene which shows you the final moments of the first Mortal Kombat’s tournament which you begin playing right after. After that the game begins to fall apart. The gameplay gives you a lot of moves you can pull off such as you can throw, punches and the special signature moves from all four of the playable characters. The problem with the gameplay is the enemies take forever to kill so you spending way too much time in specific areas trying to artificially make the game feel longer. So while the fundamental gameplay feels solid, killing enemies is like an exercise in futility. The game also optionally lets you pull Fatalities however like regular Mortal Kombat you have memorize a sequence of buttons presses and all they do is take up time so whatever time you’d save killing them this way is taken by the animation. The features a “ko-op” mode which allows you to play the single player mode with a friend which helps slightly since you’ve got two people killing enemies however the pacing still feels off. Lastly the game includes a versus mode for you to face off against friend but that’s more of a joke than an actual mode. This game was meant to be played against CPU opponents not against each other so it doesn’t really feel right.

Looking at the final game inside the package, Armageddon which feels more like Deception that a truly different game.  The combat feels very similar, except maybe a little faster and the characters also jump farther than Deception feeling closer to what you’d find in a classic Mortal Kombat. The game also has far more characters than Deception with a whooping 63 characters ranging from steps of the Mortal Kombat universe. The Konquest mode that was very useless in Deception is actually quite good in Armageddon introducing you to various Mortal Kombat characters which switches from your beat em up game to a fighting game when having a boss battle. The game also obligatory bonus game in the form of Motor Kombat, a Mario Kart they created based on the Mortal Kombat universe. While it’s nothing to write home about it is a fun distraction and should keep you busy for an hour or two.  A nice new feature added on is the “Kreate a Fighter” which gives a ton parts once you’ve unlocked everything to make your own custom with, any move you’ve seen in the game and even write this character’s history. The mode is quite solid and adds some replayability to the experience. Otherwise this feels very much like a better version of Deception.
Overall for the price of $30 you’re getting 2 okay games in Deception and Shaolin Monks and one good game in Armageddon. This comes down to $10 each individual which makes it a buy for Mortal Kombat fans that don’t already own these games. Armageddon is definitive version in the package while Deception is more a blast of the past and for those who prefer the slight differences in gameplay. If you’re a fighting game fan you might want to just pick up Armageddon in the bargain bin since that’s all you really need.

Gameplay

Graphics

Sound

Overall