Following the release of Mortal Kombat II for the Playstation 3 via the Playstation Network service, GameSpot has released a review of the game. Overall, their review showed that the port of the game is a strong port for the most part, but shows a bit of lack of polish due to some quirks in the online play and emulation. One interesting mention in the review was that while the game itself was $4.99, it states that the download was "roughly 250 MB". This puts it at half the cost of Ultimate MK3 for Xbox Live Arcade, but over five times the size. Not having a Playstation 3, we cannot confirm that this is not a typo in the article, although it does seem very likely.
While the review does call the port an "accurate version" of the arcade version of Mortal Kombat II, it does note a couple of weird issues in online play and in the emulation. From the review:
The online mode in MK2 is really weird. Rather than set up some sort of custom two-player match that is book ended by menus and scoreboards, hooking up to another player just runs an emulated version of the arcade machine game. But instead of having a second player sitting next to you, that person is someone else in the world. So, if you wanted, you could just not hit start, not join the game, and simply watch a player play single-player. And games don't end until one player disconnects from the match. This aspect of the online play feels rushed and sloppy, especially when you consider that there's no manual or anything to tell you that you need to hit start to play. In these early hours after the game's release, expect to run into a handful of new players who have no idea how to join your game. And because there's no voice chat or other method of in-game messaging, you have no way to tell other players "Hey, hit start!" Most of them figure it out after a minute or so.
The game has an online leaderboard, but it doesn't make much sense. The scoreboard just lists a number, and it's not just a raw count of the number of wins you've scored. After playing for a few hours, we found ourselves with a score of seven points. What the heck does that even mean? The world may never know.
There are also handful of technical glitches and emulation issues. For whatever reason, the fighters don't cast shadows in the Dead Pool background in this version, though they do in the arcade version. When starting a match, the audio seems to cut out for a split second, occasionally making the announcer sound like he's saying "ound" instead of "round." Also, the fatality music cuts off and the game goes nearly silent if you do the first part of Sub-Zero's two-part fatality over and over again. In the arcade version, the music just keeps looping. None of these are absolute game breakers, but they're all disappointing.
Overall, the review notes that while overall the game seems rushed and lacks extra features such as a round-robin tournament mode like UMK3 for XBLA has, it's still worth $4.99 as it's still an accurate port of MKII with online play. In the end, it was given a rating of 7.9 out of 10.
To read the review in its entirety, click here.
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