Last December,
EA Mobile released Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the iPhone and iPod Touch platforms. Today they released a new game on the AppStore just made for the iPad's larger screen,
Ultimate Mortal Kombat HD. For $4.99 you get a whole new
"Two Player Mode" that allows two players to battle head to head on the same iPad.
Unfortunately the one thing that is new to this version is not any good.
"Two Player Mode" is extremely difficult to use as you have to share the same iPad with another person. Imagine you and a friend holding the same piece of paper long ways, now pretend to play a touch based fighting game on it. There is no room to make this feature comfortable, so you better like who you are playing against. A far better option would to have the iPad screen divided down the middle for both players to get their own screen on each side of the iPad, instead of them sharing a single side of the iPad to play on.
My biggest problem with this game is
EA Mobile decided to be cheap and instead of making the existing game a "Universal iOS App" they made this into a separate "iPad only" version. But you'd think since this is the
HD version you'd think the graphics are better right? Nope, the game graphics in this version are pretty much the exact same. The weak point of this port has always been the character models. Here their design and textures are still abysmal and no improvement has been made. The backgrounds that looked great on the iPhone version look great here because they are larger and easier to see detail, but look the same as they do on my iPhone 4. To confirm this I looked at the game content and very few files are changed at all.
While the iPad version does look nicer than the iPhone version scaled up does, EA could have easily just made the previous version look this good on the iPad as well. EA is simply selling everyone the same game with one new feature for even more money.
As far as positives go, the game does have a few. The game is actually easier to play on the iPad in single player mode because the buttons are larger. The game also connects over local WiFi for multiplayer matches with the iPhone version without a problem.
The game is still just as fun as the iPhone version, but is no where near a proper arcade port of the game by any stretch of the imagination as the gameplay itself is different. Sadly all of the bad gameplay bugs I encountered on the iPhone version are still here as well. So clearly no bug fixes have been attempted in the past two months, and I doubt they'll ever attempt them. So I'd say that if you have the iPhone version of this game already, then this is
probably not worth the extra $4.99 purchase at this time. If you don't own either version and have an iPad, then I'd pick the iOS device you'd like to play it on more. Hopefully
EA Mobile will work on fixing a few of the bugs and make the game worth a purchase, or they'll likely just lower the price again to $0.99 in which it'd be a steal.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat HD can be bought on the
iTunes AppStore today for $4.99 USD.
