X'08 Hands On Impressions: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe

Midway was on hand at X'08 to show of a couple of their upcoming games including the much anticipated Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe. While Midway is still keeping the storyline behind this crazy mash up title to themselves, I'm guessing it has something to do with the general premise for the whole Mortal Kombat series: the Emperor comes to the DC Universe wanting to take over the realm and who better to compete in tournament to save the world but the super heroes from that world?

Even though Midway did sent a rep to over see the demos at the event, Reid wasn't exactly familiar with MK vs DC, so I had to feel my way through the demo. It was nice to finally meet the guy behind all my press releases though.

Midway has only released a partial list of the available characters in the game and only a small portion of those characters like Superman, Scorpion, Batman, Sonia Blade were playable characters in the demo. I chose to fight with Catwoman because she's my favourite baddie in the DC universe.

My first fight was against Scorpion and he was really easy to take down. Almost too easy. You’d think the demo was set on easy "journalist" mode or something to make us feel like experts at the game. Most of the moves are pretty straight forward - kick, punch, jump, round kick, etc, and catwoman could scratch at her opponents and use her whip on them.

When you managed to send your opponent flying over the edge of the level, your character would jump on top and continue to fight on the way down. This fighting was accomplished with a series of buttons that you plugged in as they popped up on the screen. Get them in right and you land on top of your opponent when you both hit the ground, but get them wrong and you become the landing pad.

Some levels allowed you to do this more than once and other levels changed the falling sequence with smashing through a series of walls. You still had to follow the series of buttons though to come out on top.

My second and third opponents were Superman and Sonya Blade which were much harder than Scorpion to defeat. Sonya as my third level enemy actually managed to defeat me in a round and that's when I gave up the controller to someone standing behind me.

I didn't manage to uncover any brutalities or fatalities, nor did my rep know how to active them, but they are included the game. Each character has a normal finishing cinematic with a basic defeat: Catwoman cracked her whip after each time I finished off my opponent with a normal kick or punch.




I was quite impressed with the game visually and how it played. The characters are quite detailed and Midway has been working with the DC artists to make sure everything is just right about each character. MK fans will be happy to know that some characters like the Joker do have fatality moves as seen in the newest video released by Midway.

Expect a full length review later when the game is released in stores.