Excited

Holy crap, I usually don't get excited over videogames, but Mortal Kombat:Shaolin Monks is my favorite game of the year.

Most people know that Mortal Kombat II was the game that pretty much made me decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

Also, for the past year I've been commenting on how I just want a really cool action/adventure 3D beat-em-up, without all the annoying "jumping puzzles" (the ones where screwing up means instant death), stealth modes (ugh, stealth modes in an action game suck ass), horrible placement of checkpoints, and just general annoyance and frustration in general. I know everyone is all hot-to-trot over God of War, but I watched it being played and flat out decided that it was not worth my money at all. Why should I pay to be frustrated? There were so many places that just seemed way unfair. Yeah, the cool parts were awesome, so why do you have to put in the crap? seriously.

Mortal Kombat:Shaolin Monks has so many awesome ideas it's great. The fighting style is just so intuitive. 3 attacks - quick, launch, and power. Hold R2, and these give you your 3 special attacks. For example, I played with Kung Lao, so he does his teleport, hat spin, and hat throw. Grappling is just pure bad-ass, especially when you level up your attacks. The blocking mechanic is good too, more so in a one-on-one battle. Every button on the controller is pretty much used.

But what really gets me is the different ways to dispatch your enemies. You got the straight-up beat them to death. This is the longer and harder approach, but you get health from it. Then you got the fatality approach, fill up your fatality gauge, hit them with L1 (fatality stunner), input the code, and a cutscene plays out your fatality. This takes longer to watch, but you get extra experience from it. And then, my personal favorite, are the environmental hazards. This is where grappling come in handy. You can use the environment to strategic advantage, knocking your opponents into spikes, flame, catapults, pools of acid, giant hammers, iron maidens, off of bridges, etc. It's cool, and quick, but you dont' get any health or xp from it. There's also weapons, which makes things much easier, and randomly you'll get a slowdown matrix effect when you chop off someone's head or slice them in half. Downside, can't block or do special attacks with a weapon.

There's jumping, but instead of instant death, you usually end up losing some health (by falling on spikes or in lava), and have to quickly get back up to where you came. So there's negative effects, but not impossible.

They put in some minigame stuff, ala God of War. But wait, it's "Test Your Might!", that's right, the oldschool minigame from the first Mortal Kombat. This is how you pull levers, open doors, and even fight some bosses.

The graphics and voice acting are lacking, but whatever, I'm a gameplay over graphics dude anyways.

The coolest part for me is that MK:SM is basically what's going on behind the scenes during MK2. All the characters from the first and second Mortal Kombat's show up, and there's even a special appearance by one of the cooler characters from MK3. It got frustrating at times, but not horribly so. And because they restart you back in the same room, instead of the last save point, and let you skip the cutscene you already watched, dying isn't that big of a deal.

Plus, seeing all the oldschool MK2 levels (the Pit, Soul Tombs, Portal, Dead Pool, Living Forest, etc), made me not mind playing the level again.+

I will be honest, a few times I was lost, because throughout the game you gain different acrobatic abilities ala Prince of Persia:SOT, such as Wall Jump, Wall Run, and Swing. With all these abilities, it's a bit hard sometimes to figure out if an area is actually off limits or not.

Basically, Midway took Mortal Kombat 2, Prince of Persia:Sands of Time, and God of War, and mashed them all together, strained out most of the annoying shit and put their own special spin on it, filled it chock full of secrets and collectibles ala MK:Deception and pushed it out there. It's too bad they weren't given another 2 months to really put on some polish. But then again, almost every game really needs another 2 months of polish.

It's a short game, but I'm more for quality over quantity any day. Plus, with Ko-op and Versus mode, and the ability to unlock MK2, there's still replayability. It would've been nice if they had a versus mode where you were put in a room with just a bunch of grunts that you could beat the shit out of.

This is the first time in a while that I've hoped for a sequel. I really hope they do another Mortal Kombat beat-em-up. I think they could do a really interesting one with Mortal Kombat 3's storyline.

I'm sorry that I'm raving, I don't normally do this. But after playing this game, I'm so fucking jazzed to be back at work working on an action/adventure game. Mortal Kombat:Shaolin Monks was the game I've always wanted to play for quite a long time. Thanks Midway.