For one, the game’s non-stop action is often broken up with illogical puzzles that seemingly take hours to solve. However, Monks doesn’t come without its flaws. If there were ever a game (other than GTA) to cause a political stir, it would have to be this one. The developers at Midway clearly didn’t want to hold back as you’ll see some truly sickening cutscenes (Baraka anyone?) and the game isn’t without its fair share of decapitations, dismemberments and moments of torture to make anyone with half a conscious shudder. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, Monks is a rather graphic game that has no doubt earned its rating. As well as the regular fatalities, as you progress through the game you’ll earn a total of three fatality gauges, used to perform the multality – where you kill multiple opponents at once – and the brutality, which is taken straight from Mortal Kombat 3, except you’ll have complete control over your character and can generally take down any sub-boss in a only a few hits.
Both Lao and Kang have close to 10 different fatalities to perform, some taken straight out of Mortal Kombat II (like Lui Kang’s craptastic uppercut fatality), while others are brand new to the series and present some exceedingly graphic scenarios. If the gauge is full, all you have to do is walk up to the enemy, press a single button, and voila, the screen goes dark, giving you about five seconds to enter in any number of button combinations. The option to perform a fatality is only available once you’ve filled up your fatality gauge, which is achieved by beating wave after wave of enemies. With the combo possibilities being endless, and the combat system so flashy and user friendly, it’s hard not to get all giddy when you’ve racked up a 300-hit combo and ended it with one of the many brutal fatalities the game has to offer – brutal being a severe understatement. Heck, you can even purchase half a dozen new combos if the original 50 start getting too old. And as I mentioned before, both characters come with their own set of special moves that can be used to link combos as well. Each button on the controller corresponds to a kick, punch, throw or strong attack, and each can be used in random succession to produce a variety of devastating combos. Now, the combat itself is simplistic and certainly has that easy-to-pick-up-and-play charm to it, but still takes plenty of hours to master. All of these moves can be upgraded at the cost of experience points, which you’ll gain by defeating enemies (or in most cases, multiple enemies) with style.
Each character represents a different fighting style, even though it all boils down to punching, kicking, and throwing your opponent, and as you might have guessed, both Kang and Lao come fully equipped with their respective special moves from the Mortal Kombat series. After all, what would a Mortal Kombat game be without gratuitous violence and gore? A pretty lousy one, that’s for sure.Īs you begin the game you’ll have to choose to play as either Lao or Kang, or if you’ve beaten the game, two other secret characters (I’ll give you a hint, the first character’s name rhymes with… oh what the hell – it’s Scorpion and Sub-zero). The environments are varied enough and are littered with traps, spiked floors, and many other torture devices. You’ll progress through the story by solving puzzles and defeating enemies (including close to a dozen boss fights) over many classic Mortal Kombat II locations, such as The Living Forest, The Foundry, and The Evil Monastery. Still, for those interested, Monks takes place between the end of Mortal Kombat and the end of Mortal Kombat II, and for fans of the series, it won’t be too much of a surprise to see Lui Kang and Kung Lao as the protagonists of choice. Monks follows your typical beat-em-up storyline, with plot twists that a primary school dunce could see coming, and plenty of meaningless banter about where to go next, but that’s not what Monks is really about anyway. Midway has taken just about everything we love about the series – a strong cast of crazies, combos galore, and enough blood to coat the country three times over – and bundled it up into a neat little package for our enjoyment.īlood, guts and sexual tension aside (oh Lui and Katana, when will they ever learn?), Shaolin Monks actually sports a story, and more surprisingly, an interesting one. But with every failure comes a success (according to my mother at least), as is the case with Shaolin Monks. Of course, there was a little title known as Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, but did anyone actually play that? I suppose Mythologies’ biggest downfall was that fans knew what it could have been, and what it clearly wasn’t.
What surprises me the most about Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks is the fact that it took Midway this long to realise the potential of a Mortal Kombat-inspired scrolling beat-em-up.