With twelve different fighters, they all have their own play styles although I do find myself wondering how Mileena and Baraka are both Tarkatans, and Mileena and Kitana are twins cloned from one another, but its Kitana and Baraka that share a lot of the same maneuvers. Again, the game brought a lot of fresh things to the table that were still cohesive to everything familiar. Jax joins the game to find his comrade Sonya. The heroes have allies as well, Liu Kang has newcomer Kung Lao. Kahn’s daughter Kitana and her clone of a twin sister Mileena. Baraka, a Tarkatan with blades in his arms and jagged teeth. Shao Kahn had imprisoned Kano and Sonya from the original game, but he brought a whole slew of new assassins, thugs and rogues to play as.
Reptile can become invisible, Liu Kang turns into a giant dragon for a fatality and Jax can pound faces. The game manages to make a lot of the characters feel special. To make Shang feel special, you can even morph into other characters when you play as him. In order to get to Kahn, you’ll need to climb a tournament ladder to the top with each match having two out of three rounds for a winner.īefore you fight Kahn and his bodyguard, you’ll still have to fight Shang Tsung who is now a lot younger than he was, but he can still morph into anyone in the game.
Both Kahn and Kintaro (Kahntaro?) are towers, superior and stand out from everyone else in the game. The two bosses Shao Kahn and his four-armed Shokin bodyguard Kintaro felt like true obstacles compared to Shang Tsung from the previous game. At the time it was a big deal playing as both of them from the start. You’ll find two new big bosses while making a former boss, Shang Tsung and a secret character into two new playable characters. Each one has new moves and just play better than the previous game. They each look far better than they ever did in the previous game. The bland, easy to play as Liu Kang, the Hollywood actor Johnny Cage that grew more over-the-top in this game, the thunder god Raiden, Sub-Zero the frosty ninja and Scorpion the somewhat generic ninja with a spear. Most of the original characters are back. The new characters were all interlinked, perhaps more than any other game in the main series. You’ll find a lot of life and flair in Mortal Kombat 2 in its backgrounds to character connections. These new characters felt unique and not just taken from popular movies like Big Trouble in Little China or the Terminator. There’s just something special about Mortal Kombat 2, it felt fresh before the game became just a rehash of itself. Mortal Kombat 2 an era that the Mortal Kombat franchise has gone back to time and time again with Shaolin Monks and even Mortal Kombat 9. A jump kick will take out a sweep, but an uppercut will take out a jump kick. There’s a risk and reward to every attack like rock-paper-scissors. Sweeps, uppercuts, roundhouse kicks, crouch attacks and up to jump in. These special moves and fatalities weren’t readily available outside of magazines.Įven if all characters fight the same, there’s still depth to even basic moves. The only thing that you need to learn are their special moves which make them all different. At the time it was unique and since all of the fighters play the same it made the game accessible. Unlike other fighting games, it incorporated a simpler high punch, low punch, high kick, low kick button scheme that included a block button. If you dig deeper, you could also perform babalities and friendships, but only if you don’t punch in that round.įor those that don’t know, Mortal Kombat is a bloody, ultra violent one-on-one fighter.
Each of the game’s twelve playable characters each has two fatalities. More characters, more moves, more secrets, more stages, more blood and of course more fatalities. Mortal Kombat 2 brought more of what everyone loved from the original arcade classic. Now that Mortal Kombat has released a sequel to its famous reboot that went back in time to stop the events of Armageddon, I decided that it was time to take a look back at the original sequel.