Grarr!  Do we really need another MK game?  Deception claims to fix the problems of the last one, to gross us out with insanely gruesome finishing moves, and to “konsume” us… but can it?  I’m leaving my bias at the door, it’s time to check out Mortal Kombat: Deception.

All biases aside, this game… this game sucks. I know that is not professional journalism, and I know that degrades my work as a video game writer. But heck, I’ll say it again: this game sucks.

We get an array of different ways to play this game—from a puzzle game a la Puzzle Fighter, to a chess-like game featuring a board and different rules—but what about the fighting engine? Did they forget this game is a fighting game? The engine is just plain bull. You “type” in combos as fast as your fat fingers can in hopes of throwing your enemy through a cornucopia of different gruesome “finish-zones”, and that’s about it.

Yeah, there’s a lot of blood, yeah you get a whole bunch of different modes, yeah the graphics are pretty good, and yeah you might have a little bit of fun online playing some Puzzle Kombat, but this is a fighting game. Quite simply: the fighting engine, something obviously important in a “FIGHTING game”, just plain reeks. You can argue that they have three different fighting styles per character all you want, but that doesn’t stop the game from being anything more than a laughable and slowly coordinated button-masher.

Speaking of laughable, I’m wondering what the designers of this game were thinking when they made these characters. “What kind of characters are there?” you say? Let’s see…big-breasted harlots dressed in neo-gothic multi-color pleather, a drunken fat guy, and many weirdoes who don’t know how to match colors. They’re all so cheesy and dumb looking. My young nephew could probably design better characters using his box of crayons and one of the pages in a schoolbook of mine.

Not to mention the insanely cheap enemies that makes the game difficult in some points. Brings back memories of the old games where I’d get toe kicked by a four armed man a couple times then thrown off a cliff onto spikes. Cheesy, insanely unfair, and absolutely infuriating, especially after you realize the game is not worth your time.

Most of all the “extras” you unlock are just candid photos of the unintelligent people who put this “game” together. So far as replay goes, you’re screwed. I just played through cheap enemies and a stupid fighting engine just to see some stupid photos of the imbeciles who made this game?

Everything about this game is just… unpolished. Sometimes in my reviews I’ll say “when it all comes together…” in my last paragraphs, but sadly I can’t say that about this game. It just “all” didn’t “come together” this time folks. I hope they never make another Mortal Kombat game again. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go play ET: Extra Terrestrial—an obviously better game—to cleanse the stain from my soul.

Oh, and by the way: stop with the lame “k” gimmick. IT’S SPELLED “COMBAT”.