Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3

Today we are taking a closer look at Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. The main thing we are focusing on today is the 16-bit version of the game. MK2 is my favorite in the series and I felt that Mortal Kombat 3 was not as good. While I do feel that they improved many things with this Ultimate version of the game, I still feel that it does not live up to what Mortal Kombat 2 offered.

The Earth Shall Be Mine

Just like in Mortal Kombat 2, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 once again fleshes out the lore of the MK universe. This time around Shao Khan can use his dead wife Sindel to open up the portals to Earth Realm so he can take it by force. This means that the game is now set on Earth. It is a pretty cool story and one that I do like. The story is actually the same as it was in the standard Mortal Kombat 3, but in all honesty, I see no reason for them to have changed it here.

Welcome Back

Visually, the game has been downgraded quite a bit from the arcade. The poor old Genesis just was not able to handle all that the arcade offered. It does though have much of what mattered and that is the returning characters such as Scorpion and Kitana along with more stages. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is an interesting looking game. I loved the stages that were in MK2 and the ones here are very different. As the game is set on Earth the stages have a more realistic look to them which is ok, I guess, but again it is one thing that makes it less special than Mortal Kombat 2.

Fight!

Each character has multiple finishing moves although they did take out the Animalities which kind of sucked. The fighting is nice and tight and this game along with MK3 put a heavy emphasis on combos with each character having multiple devastating combos that they could do. I guess you could argue that the fighting here was deeper than it was in MK2.

You can select which tower you want to do; each tower has a different number of opponents. Each character has their own ending and the difficulty, in general, is much higher here than it was in MK 2. You also have some extra game modes which are a great deal of fun when you are playing with your friends. The tournament mode in particular was a real favorite of mine back in the day.

I always have a hard time talking about Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and MK3 I general. It always comes across that I do not like them, but that is not actually true. I feel that this is a great addition to the series and I love the direction the story went along with the new and returning characters in the game. It is very hard to explain, but Mortal Kombat 2 is just a better game!

Pros:

• Lots of characters including some returning favorites
• Plenty of stages
• I liked the combo system
• The story is really cool
• The multiplayer modes are a lot of fun

Cons:

• A fair bit of stuff is missing from the arcade and 32-bit version
• It is missing something that MK2 had which made that game so special