Mortal Kombat 4

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!

***

I was interested to see what Midway could do with the series with it's venture into complete 3D. I had immensely enjoyed the past 3 games. When I finally got to play Mortal Kombat 4. I felt indifferent about it at first. The full 3D aspect was different. The graphics weren't all they could be for a PS1 game in my opinion.

The new character additions were average to bad. Some old characters look alright for their first time in 3D. Some of the fatalities are redone for the full 3D world. Which is cool. There are also stage fatalities in this game. Which hasn't been seen since MK2 by this time. They are done nicely. Babalities, Animalities, Brutalities, and Frienships are all taken away in this game.

Mortal Kombat 4 also introduced weapons. I was never a big fan of weapons in Mortal Kombat 4. As they are a optional in the game. Which eventually leads to them being a throw away in my opinion. The best action is with the characters moves and hand to hand combat.

My biggest complaints about this game is the end boss Shinnok. First off he has one of the most annoying voices in the game. He's very easy to face and his fatalities are a bit plain maybe even comical. He's one of the worst bosses of the MK series.

Voice acting has never been MK's strong point, but the ending FMV's are marred by bad voice acting. Choppy and sometimes stiff looking movements. I can see why they did and eventually stuck with the still picture endings. All in all it's a decent MK game. Can't really call it bad, but it could've been a lot better.

This game is definitely an improvement of MK Trilogies. The new fatalities are great. Except they should have kept animalities, those were cool. Thank god they got rid of brutalities though, those sucked, and so did the comedy in the last game. And it's too bad that some of the warriors are gone. Like a lot of the ninjas and female fighters, the were very much needed. But the new 3-d stages are great.

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.