READ FIRST 10/28 Information: I knew this was made by Smoke soon after I made the review. This does not change my opinion since Kabal was involved. Updated to reflect that. I apologize for my inaccuracies and that I am late to correct myself. READ ABOVE FIRST!

I played UMKT back in 2008, and it was amazing with my friends with all the new content, and just it was a good game not to take seriously! However, playing by myself made me realize how buggy and unstable it really was. Does this year-old “sequel” fix what was broken on UMKT? Well, not quite. Some things are actually worse, in fact.

Fun Factor: On UMKT, we saw some original designs with characters while some were just plain unoriginal in order to improvise a full moveset. MK2 Noob was god tier while MK1 Cage was able to do splitting low blows while jumping backwards. It was full of wackiness that was good for a laugh or two, but having friends made it better. This game looks to be more serious, however, so I’ll treat it as such. This game has some fun in it, but it is killed off by buggy moves and horrible glitches. That will be covered later.

Roster: Eight characters are removed and two are new. MK1 Cage, Liu Kang, Shang Tsung, and the ninjas, and MK2 Cage (the duplicate Kahn was actually just a stronger version); and Quan Chi and Hydro were added. That’s a total of 51 characters from the 57 the previous work had. It’s odd that MK2 Cage got the boot. He could have taken that waste of an MK symbol, and he is the only character that doesn’t have a “classic” version of himself (Dan Pesina MADE Mortal Kombat as good as it was back then!). The only other possible improvements for the roster would be more original characters or characters from Mythologies.

Visuals: The character selection looks clean, as you can see on the screenshot. However, the content is recycled from UMKT with only slight touchups if anything. 2012’s technology could allow re-conversion of the arcade graphics into the Genesis to improve them somewhat. There’s no cart limitations, with this, so I say the bigger file size and effort would probably be worth it. I praise the effort regardless because it seemed to be a solo work.

Sound: The sound is the typical, but worse. Everything is jumbled around because of the new soundbytes. You can hear Shao Kahn say Babality and Animality in the options menu, and Flawless Victory and Fatality are played at the same time if you achieve both. Even though they are small issues, it shows how much neglect the game had in focus on the content.

Quality: This game evidently has not been playtested much at all. The bugs from the Shokan’s leap are intolerable and destroy their potential. Quan Chi is embarrassingly underpowered with useless moves. The AI also did a stage Fatality on me in Kahn’s throne room out of all places! Hydro is essentially a Cyber Sub-Zero, and appears to be ripped straight from a Mortal Kombat Project Mugen I had back in 2008, down to the robotic self-addressing. He’s passable and fun to use with a unique moveset inspired slightly by Glacius. I can’t comment on the character balance because of the bugs ruining the experience. I think someone there could have converted that depressing kneel punch given to MKT Cage into an actual split punch if he saw the more updated MKP. Copying from Mugen is a little sad, but converting it into actual content on a game isn’t really a bad idea. I can say that the characters look and feel to be a direct port, so there may be imbalances between the “games” (correct me if I am wrong, as I don’t want this to be true). Kabal did state he did not care about the quality of the MK1 fighters during his work on UMKT, after all.

Developmental opinions: I have the impression the work was done solo. The amount of bugs created shows how little effort was given to maintain the integrity of the game. There were even poorly made fatalities and animalities just to add more content when animalities at least could have been removed. I’m sure anybody would gladly offer help for such a project given how much was done already. Custom sprites and playtesting are the ones I would think benefit the most for this. [s]I wish I could find out if there was actually a community around Kabal_MK’s works, but I have no luck. Anybody can account for how much a community can help benefit and polish a game.[/s] Update: I did find out more about this rom from a Russian site. Although I had to use a translator, the information I received was that Smoke and Kabal knew there were bugs, but didn’t want to fix them. It gave me the impression that they just wanted to add everything and move on. Lazy, maybe?

Final thoughts: Overall, this game is a step back from UMKT, but you can try it if the roster appeals to you. It’s too bugged to be enjoyable. I expected a more polished game from someone working with Kabal since it was at least three years between this and UMKT. The ROM says 1.0 BETA 2. I really hope this gets polished. This would have been a hack worth playing like MK2 Unlimited. For right now until (more like if) this game gets another update I’d suggest you to only /try/ this hack. If you aren’t the slightest interested in MK3 or UMK3, then don’t even download this. This is not a legitimate improvement to the game, but rather a trade-off in quality for quantity. This game is barely playable, don’t get me wrong. I decided to say no since I can’t say I would want others to try this out. That, and I couldn’t leave that option blank…

My last notes: Don’t try to do a crouching Low Punch with Shao Kahn unless you want to crash the game with a BSOD. And then pray that you don’t face MK2 Jade first match or else you will be owned between aggressive AI and a broken hurtbox.