Here's some whining about the game... for reference, I was really looking forward to a solid single player game here. There's a lot of content in terms of hours here but not so much in terms of quality.
I hate the AI in this game. I thought I'd love the tower mode but it's so broken and just "unfun". The "read my inputs and act appropriately" AI makes what should be fun and challenging just frustrating.
One of the tower challenges had Kano vs "enraged Scorpion". Cool - a tough 1 vs 1 battle, I can dig it. But he kept kicking my ass - start with a jump and he'd jump and throw me. Start with a projectile and he'd teleport. To test out it wasn't just my reaction time I held down block since before the round started - as soon as it started Scorpion would cast fire on me, which is unblockable... this happened three times in a row, so it's not a coincidence. This bad AI really takes the shine off what should have been a great single player mode.
Most of the challenges need to be beaten by "learning the puzzle" - so it's not about getting better at the game or learning the characters, but about picking a hole in the AI. This is a real shame.
I can't remember the last game with a great single player mode... Tekken 3 was the last that really hooked me in - the combination of survival/arcade/time trial made gave you solid tools for honing your defences and counters. Why can't other games get this sort of stuff right?
Why is there so much content on the disc that I can't play? My brief list is:
- Retro costumes - you can even play as retro Scorpion in the tower... yet I can't actually use them for other play
- Goro is available in tower mode too but not in other modes
- Third costumes for some players - Scorpion's "hell"/flaming skull in tower mode, 'Cyber Reptile', etc
Why are babailities and stage fatalities not unlockable in the krypt? Why do I need to go online to find out how to do everything in the game? I get the "heritage" of the game but if that's the case, scrap the whole kyrpt. Don't let me unlock, say, 25% of the games secrets with your rewards system and make me google how to get the rest of them.
Why can't I practice babalities in the fatality trainer? In order to get each person's finishing moves into the game's "move list", I need to actually perform them. So with browser window open, I'm punching them in after real fights of the tower, then going back to the main menu and changing characters. Enabling this in the fatality trainer is a far better option. Ditto for stage fatalities.
Shao Khan (and the sub-bosses for that matter) having uniterruptable and unblockable attacks is just lazy design. The bosses in this game are so cheap, and it's only because the actual mechanics of the game aren't designed for beating them... so you need to work out how to beat them being restricted to the natural rules of the game. Oh, and if the AI decides you should die, you will die. I had Shao Khan repeatedly throw hammers at me, killing me from a full bar of health. Because each hammer stuns, you are basically fucked after being hit by one. He's done the same to me by shoulder-charging me into oblivion.
Teleporting characters are basically on a different tier than non-teleporting characters. There are core balancing issues that need to be dealt with which separate characters that need to navigate by jumping/moving.
Why can't I choose my character on nearly all the challenge tower modes? It would make most of the stupid challenges much more bearable.
Oh - and there's a crazy bug where if I look at the "rules" in the tower challenge, my controls are reset to default. To remedy this I need to go back to the main menu. Basically this means after beating each tower battle I try to read the rules in the second it takes to load - if I can do that I try and discern the rules of battle. If that fails - I read the rules, then go back to the main menu, and then go back to the tower.
There's the framework of a great game here... it's just that the game doesn't seem to offer the tools to let me learn it offline. If they could put in some decent AI (patch it in?) I could deal with just the arcade mode... but as is there's not enough to make me need to learn hows to play well, nor is there enough content to reward me for playing well.
