Mortal Kombat 4

I have been the biggest Mortal Kombat fan since the beginning and I was hoping that this would do for 3D fighters graphicswise what Mortal Kombat II did for 2D games back in the day meaning. This would look like real actors, in 3D making all others look cartooney. But that's not the case. Ever since Mortal Kombat 3 things had got progressively cartoony, both MK3 and T (which are essentially the same) had got cheesy-wwf-marvel comics like and while it was starting to get better here it underwhelmed me when I saw it at the arcade.

Gameplay wise it is not an improvement instead of trying to fix what they already had they stripped almost everything out. The weapons where kind of neat but they could easily be knocked out of your hands and they didn't significantly add to the gameplay. Then to compound all of this they took the decent looking 3,000 polygon models from the arcade and reduced them to about 600 polygons for the N64\PSX\PC versions and the didn't even have to lower it for the PC but they just wanted to do a quick port make once, run everywhere. They corrected this graphicswise with the dreamcast version later, MK Gold but it was too little, too late.

Here is "Mortal Kombat 4," the first game in the legendary martial arts series about fighters competing in an otherworldly martial arts tournament in order to save the world to be in full 3D. That's right. Full, 3D arena combat, which is a formula that would carry on well into later games in the series. But somehow the formula doesn't work. Not sure, maybe it's the graphics or flawed combo system. Or it could be the fact that it came out in 1997, the same year as the horrendous "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation." The late 1990s were not very friendly to "Mortal Kombat," even though the first "Mortal Kombat" movie in 1995 rocked, and to this day probably remains the greatest video game-to-movie translation yet. I don't know. But it's still a great opportunity to battle friends to the death in gruesome martial arts combat.

7/10

This game is pretty fun-- but like the rest of the Mortal Kombat games, it lacks in gameplay. But the gameplay is much better than the other Mortal Kombat games. This game is still good, but lose the bad gameplay. UGH!

***

But that doesn't say much since Midway's "true 3D fighting game" royally sucked. MK4 brought back a handful of MK veterans, and the new characters for the most part are forgettable. Jarek? Reiko? Tanya? Who cares about these guys? Shinnok does nothing as the last boss of the game; his henchman Quan Chi steals the show from him half the time, and is far more intimidating.

Mortal Kombat in 3D plays very much like previous entries into the Mortal Kombat world instead of truly taking advantage of the extra dimension . . . and somehow it doesn't play or feel quite right. It feels more like a clone of Mortal Kombat desperately trying to be Mortal Kombat.

Gone is the plethora of finishing moves--both good and bad since with UMK3 (MKTrilogy) the choice was overwhelming. Did they really need 2 to 3 Fatalities, a Friendship, Babality, Brutality, Animality, and the Mercy? No. So, yeah, it's nice to go back to just the Fatalities and drop the rest.

The animated 3D endings were nice, it's just a shame the motions were generic. It would've been really nice to get Tekken-ish or even Soul Blade style endings where you actually get a different ending depending on if you hit a button sequence at a key place. But oh well, these were the most fun endings of any MK game. Way better than the still shots and text.

"Mortal Kombat 4" takes the series into the world of 3d-fighters, and is it able to kick its opponents? Not a chance. The world of 3d-fighters is dominated by series such as "Tekken" and "Virtua Fighter", and the latest MK-game isn`t up to scratch. The 3d visuals found here are rough, but the pace of the game is therefore very fast, but it is packed with a cartoony feeling and badly balanced gameplay. I hoped that this series could`ve died after the superb "Mortal Kombat Trilogy", but I was wrong. Don`t buy these games anymore, and perhaps the developers will stop making them. Stick to "Mortal Kombat Trilogy".

5,5/10