Kombat X Fatalities Battle

Kombat X Fatalities is puzzle games as part of the fighting package.

However, it's a decent second place title, featuring a full-fledged Kombat mode with an all new boss and six extra characters selectable right from the start, including Ermac and Goro. There are other modes to choose from as well, although they won't exactly appeal to everyone.

Given that Unchained is based on Deception, it includes most of the same relative strengths and weaknesses of that game.

So, in addition to the one-on-one fighting game at the heart of the experience, you get a couple of quirky extras in the form of chess kombat.

These were exciting extras in 2004, but their novelty outweighed their quality or lasting appeal, and by now, the appeal will be long gone for anyone who's played these modes before.

Unchained also packs in a story-driven mode called "konquest," which gets into a lot of the elaborate, long-winded fiction of the Mortals universe, with numbingly bad pacing and voice acting, plus tons of pedantic tutorials.

Noticeably long loading times bog down these extras as well as the one-on-one fighting, in which you're stuck waiting about 20 seconds in between a typical bout.

Fighters duke it out by matching up squares and gems to eliminate them from the screen, building combos. At the end of a match, the option to deliver a fatality on one of the super-deformed characters is present, adding a flavor to this game all its own. It's loads of fun, especially if you can find a friend that wouldn't mind hooking up wirelessly for a versus match.

Thankfully, there's a new endurance mode that lets you take on successive opponents without much interruption, and that about does it for this game's new content.

The former adds a basic strategic layer on top of the one-on-one fighting, in a nod to the classic computer game Archon.

The latter is a competitive puzzle game inspired by the great Super Mortal Fighter Kombat Fatalities.

While many of the changes to the fighting system in the recent the game were more of a step sideways than a step forward,

going back to the Deception style of gameplay may not be an easy transition, even for devout Fatalities Fighter 2 fans.

Meanwhile, anyone unaccustomed to Mortal's recent evolutions will probably be overwhelmed by the counter-intuitive nature of the controls.

The controls, however, are a different story. Some will love it and get right into pulling off multiple combos, while others will struggle with the faulted D-pad and try to pull off fatalities and special moves a number of times with little or no success. It's not like the controls completely suck, they're just difficult to pull off with something like the game. They're mapped correctly, with players able to switch between three fighting stances on-the-fly, but the uphill battle remains.

The combat has a stiff feel to it that doesn't click until you've learned all of the controls and a given character's moves and combos.

Notably, Armageddon's fairly interesting kreate-a-fighter mode isn't in here, nor is the custom fatality system.

It's a strange thing to say about a supposedly new game, but the one-on-one fighting in Kombat Fatalities 2 hasn't aged particularly well.

But by the same token, at least they didn't botch it and leave us with a game that would want to make us rip our own heads off. Wait...is that even possible?