Genre: Fighting
Publisher: Midway
Developer: Midway
Release Date: October 9, 2006

Okay, now all sorts of things make more sense.

I’d wondered why Mortal Kombat: Deception’s character roster was like this deliberate parade of relentless, unforgiving suck, featuring the 3D debuts of many of the characterizational misfires from Mortal Kombat 3. Now I know: it was so they’d have them all nicely encoded when it came time to make Armageddon.

Ed Boon, the guy who pretty much runs the Mortal Kombat show, claims that Armageddon is the end of this chapter of the Mortal Kombat franchise. To that end, they’ve thrown the rulebook out the window and brought back just about everybody from every Mortal Kombat game. This includes obscure characters like Sareena, who appeared in Mythologies and the notoriously poor Mortal Kombat: Tournament Edition, and Stryker, a riot cop from Mortal Kombat 3 and one of the single most hated characters in fighting-game history. Everyone’s back, with almost no exceptions, whether they’re dead or not. (Then again, being dead in the MK universe tends to be a temporary condition.) The lone exception, reportedly, is the centaur Motaro, the sub-boss from Mortal Kombat 3, whose giant centaur-ness posed too great a challenge to animate.

Midway provided a partial build of Armageddon where Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Goro, Kintaro, Sheeva (reimagined as a scary mohawked bodybuilder with four arms), Stryker (who’s gone all ninja), Kai (Liu Kang’s Shaolin sidekick from Mortal Kombat 4), Sareena, and Shao Kahn, among others, were all playable, and all sporting a stripped-down version of the new-school MK moveset; each one had a weapon style and a single martial-arts style.

The storyline of Armageddon isn’t quite clear at this point, aside from the obvious: all bets are off. The Mortal Kombat series concerns itself mostly with the war between the martial artists and soldiers of our world, Earthrealm, against the machinations and plots of not only human criminals, but the sorcerers, monsters, and fighters of what’s known as Outworld. The Mortal Kombat tournament used to be a method by which the Earthrealm was defended every hundred years, but thanks to the plots of various bastards, the situation has become one of open, ongoing war.

If you liked MK’s style with Deadly Alliance and Deception, Armageddon is your type of game. Conversely, if you didn’t like it, you may want to give it another try; the combat still lacks that certain sense of flow and style that characterizes a Tekken game, but it’s got more going for it than it has. It feels much more solid, and the controls are tighter. The combo-tastic gameplay has been augmented with the new Air Kombat, allowing you to string together aerial hitstrings Marvel vs. Capcom-style, and the bloody “ring outs” from Deception make a return. The general theme here, more than anything else, is Deception plus a million; if you liked that, here’s much, much more of it.

More importantly, you could also play with the Create-a-Kombatant mode, which is one of the big draws of Armageddon. You can put together a new kombatant of your very own, complete with a Create-A-Fatality mode ranging from the obvious (decapitations, dismemberment, horrible stab wounds, ripping out organs) to the elaborate (some long combination of all of the above, plus so much more).

Your new kombatant can be assigned not only fighting styles, a race, and an outfit – placing him or her within one of the traditional Mortal Kombat organizations, such as the Shaolin, the Lin Kuei, the Black Dragon, or what-have-you – but individual special moves. Then you can take your character – who may in fact be broken as hell; there’s no way of knowing yet, but I just have a feeling, you know? – online to take on other fighters via Xbox Live.

Mortal Kombat is something of a guilty pleasure of mine, and Armageddon promises to deliver all of the reasons why: gratuitous bloodshed, a deeply strange storyline that’s like a Hong Kong martial-arts fantasy on crystal meth, plenty of characters and fatalities to see and play with, and the return of Konquest mode.