Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks screens

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[b]Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks screens[/b]

Don\'t you just hate it when you\'re right all of the time? It\'s a heavy load to bear, and for the man on the street it may quickly become all too much. Tragic, really. Luckily, we\'re seasoned pros, accustomed to the weight of gaming omnipresence. So after our review of the slightly disappointing Mortal Kombat: Deception condemned the series for \"forgetting what had originally made it special\", it came as no real surprise to us quasi-divine types that the next instalment, Shaolin Monks, is planning on a massive return to the classic first few games of the franchise. Admit it, we\'re good, aren\'t we? Infallible, even.

Well, sort of. MK publisher Midway is adamant that Shaolin Monks will be absolutely dripping with early Kombat-lore and armpit-deep in the story, characters and environments from the first three games. But at the same time, the new title is ditching the classic one-on-one fighting gameplay that made MK\'s name back in the day. Not only that, but it\'s replacing it with a hack \'n\' slash action adventure. We freely admit that not even we saw that one coming.

Still, aside from completely altering the nature of the game, Midway seems to have taken our advice about recapturing the spirit of the early games to heart. If you see what we mean. For starters, the Shaolin monks of the title are MK stalwarts Liu Kang and Kung Lao - Liu Kang is the central character in single-player mode, while a friend can join as Kung Lao in co-op. Plus, even though Shaolin Monks isn\'t technically a fighting game, it\'s still got mad love for all things brutal and excessive, and the violence bears all the hallmarks of old Kombats. Both hero characters possess a massive ten fatalities apiece, and environmental interaction has once again been taken to new gruesome heights. We\'re thinking in particular of the man-bursting carnivorous tree found in the re-imagined version of Mortal Kombat 2\'s Living Forest arena, which you can feed enemies to like mansized dog-chews. Other death traps - spikes, ledges, pools of acid - are found on just about every level.

As for how the fighting will play, early comparisons have equated it to Prince Of Persia. Whether this can manage to scale such lofty heights remains to be seen, but it\'s certainly aiming to deliver a similar fighting experience - intuitive, but complex enough to merit serious play time. The controls begin with a basic one-button/one-move system, but can be combined to perform flowing, multi-directional combos and throws. There\'s even a neat touch where you can attack backwards to hit enemies approaching from behind without whipping around, so there\'s no turning your back on deadly assailants, as was occasionally the case in POP.

Unavoidably though, the new genre setting means some new gameplay elements. But even these have been shot through with trademark MK touches. Take the puzzles and platforming. Potentially a deal-breaking slump in the action, they\'ve been given the full nasty treatment. At one point, Kang faces a wall of spikes with a ledge on top that he needs to reach. He can\'t double jump off the spikes to the opposite wall - that would be fatally stupid. Unless... unless he impales an enemy on the spikes and uses his soft, lifeless body as a cushion. That\'s recycling the Mortal Kombat way, and Midway promises there are loads of ingenious, darkly comical puzzles just like it.

Suddenly, swapping MK\'s enduringly popular formula for an untried RPG-ish adventure doesn\'t seem so whack. Sure, there\'s still a chance it could go horribly wrong, but it\'s a gutsy move. And when you remember that the rigidity of the fighting engine - plus a general sense of tiredness - were our main complaints with Deception, a move away from the mano-a-mano stylings could be just the thing to revitalize MK\'s fortunes. Consider our bloodlust stirred.


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