Plus, just because Midway is so good to you, there is an unlockable demo of The Suffering: Ties That Bind, and an unlockable, full-featured version of Mortal Kombat II in there for the taking. There is the single-player game, the Ko-op, and the Versus. I should explain that this one or two-player game offers a few modes of play.
I started the cooperative game with Liu Kang because I preferred his intuitive fighting moves, but when I started the single-player game, I picked Kung Lau and grew to appreciate his style over Liu Kang's in the long run. Each is endowed with his own special moves, animations, and style of fighting, and both are great in their own ways. You can pick from two characters to start: Kung Lau (the martial arts master with the blade-rimmed hat) or Liu Kang (the fireball shooting, high-pitched screaming, martial arts expert). Lifted from the relatively pure genre of one-on-one combat, Shaolin Monks is an action-adventure specializing in fighting. Modes of Play Bizarre aesthetics aside, the gameplay follows through with a more direct purpose. Looking at the game, listening to it, and watching the gore fly, it's all sort of like attending a wild cheese-whiz party where at first you don't want to go, but you're compelled to stay. You wonder what sort of cheese will be thrown at you next, and each time it comes, you're strangely, happily satisfied. The over-the-top fatalities, rip-roaring bloodletting and simplistic designs combine to form a landscape that's so cheesy and B-movie-like in execution that they're embarrassingly likeable. The mix is sometimes hard on the senses, but in Shaolin Monks the result is so comic and in its own way, absurd, that it's likeable despite itself. Instead, Mortal Kombat appears to have drawn in equal proportions from Asian martial arts, general European bestiaries, and early '70s cartoons. There doesn't seem to be a singular source, like say, Norse mythology.
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I've always been flummoxed by the random mish-mash of creatures and influences from which the series draws its influences. But Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks works on a number of levels, some of which are obvious, and some seem to be almost by mistake. Numerous other developers have tried and failed. That is to successfully shift a fighting game into another genre. Aesthetics Ed Boon and his talented development team have done something that seems so natural and seemingly obvious that one wonders why it wasn't done before. Shaolin Monks is a pretty basic action-adventure title, but because the fighting move list is so deep and the action so fun, the result produces an arcade-style joy like few other games have.
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In fact, Mortal Kombat Trilogy did suck, but Shaolin Monks, despite a few rough edges, not only offers a good single-player game, but delivers an extraordinary co-op game.įinally breaking free from the confines of the fighting genre, Midway's Shaolin Monks brings the fighting army of Kombatants into a different setting, yet retains the fighting moves, styles, personalities and Kombat lore that have made the franchise such a strange cultural phenomenon. It was a shame it was canceled.Midway Games' Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks is one those games that, four years ago, would have sucked. I was really looking forward to doing level design and construction for it. The game was codenamed Fire & Ice – as those two characters were to be the main characters. A few design docs were worked on, and a few characters were made in 3D – Scorpion and Subzero. Then we started work on TNA Wrestling.Ī prototype level was built, but that was it.
Half the studio was laid off, and new management was brought in. I don’t have anything else to show you unfortunately. It was canceled within a few weeks of my arriving at Midway. “They actually started the early stages of that game, but they couldn’t do it in time and under budget, so the project was canceled and kind of went away.”Īlso, in august 2009 The Realm of Mortal Kombat fansite was able to get in contact with a former Paradox developer, that shared some more info and a level design concept for Shaolin Monks 2: It was gonna be a co-operative Scorpion and Sub-Zero game,” Boon said. “When they finished, the guys at Paradox were gonna do another one called Fire & Ice. A prototype was created for the Xbox 360, to test their new “next generation” graphic engine, but soon the project had to be canned, as revealed by Ed Boon to Game Informer: Mortal Kombat: Fire & Ice is the cancelled sequel to Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, that was in development from late 2005 till early 2006 by Paradox (later renamed Midway Studios Los Angeles).