Mortal Kombat - Armageddon

Every fighter Midway had ever put on a Mortal Kombat select screen turned up for this one, well over sixty of them, from Liu Kang and Scorpion down to the deep cuts nobody had thought about since the Nintendo 64. That number is the whole pitch and the whole problem. A roster that size cannot be balanced, and nobody involved pretended otherwise. What it could be was a liquidation sale for the 3D era, a last look at the branch of the series that ran from Deadly Alliance through Deception before the 2011 reboot burned it down.

The trade that made it possible was fatalities. Instead of writing a finisher for each character, Midway built Kreate-a-Fatality: knock the loser down, then chain limb-tearing button prompts together until you fumble the timing. It is a fair system on paper and a hollow one in practice, because the horror of a classic fatality came from its specificity, from knowing that this fighter did this appalling thing. Generic dismemberment, repeated, becomes housekeeping. The other create tool, Kreate-a-Fighter, fared better as a novelty, letting players build a custom brawler out of parts and assign moves, and it was genuinely unusual for a console fighter in 2006.

The fighting itself pares back the three-style system to roughly two per character, adds air combat that lets you juggle opponents into extended midair exchanges, and keeps the death traps in the arena floors and walls. It plays fast and loose. Combos are long, blocking is generous, and matches between two people who know what they are doing become a contest over who gets the first launcher. Serious players had already moved on to other games by then, and Armageddon knows it.

Around the versus mode sits an unusual amount of stuff. Konquest is a third-person action campaign following Taven, closer to a Beat 'em Up than to the freeform exploration of Deception's version, and it drags well before it ends. Motor Kombat is the strange one: a chunky kart racer with big-headed versions of the cast, tracks with lava pits, and its own set of kill moves. It should be filler. It is oddly durable in a room with three other people.

As a competitive fighting game it is loose and overstuffed. As a museum with the doors thrown open, it is the most complete Mortal Kombat that had ever existed, and the last one Midway would make on this hardware. There is something fitting about a series built on death scenes ending its longest era by making the deaths interchangeable.