In fact, despite the game's adventure elements, including new wall-running, climbing and swing moves, combat plays such a huge role that many of the puzzles can only be solved through judicious use of violence. The idea behind this, according to Himmerick, is to avoid the passive nature of most puzzles in other games and give a real visceral thrill when gamers encounter a solution. We saw a whole host of examples in action: in one part of the game, the only way to progress passed a sea of salivating serpents is to wrench up your opponents and sling them straight into the snakes' gullets, until they're satiated. Another of our favourites was a sequence where the deadly duo launched oncoming combatants over the edge of a platform into huge whirring blades - the goal to shatter the blades under all that bodily butchering and reach the lower levels of the dungeon.

[color=orange]The best part about the game's state of completion was that it was possible to finally get a feel for the puzzles and hidden items that will be liberally strewn throughout the game. While in Goro's Lair, flinging an opponent at a chained skeleton on the wall yielded a secret. Later on, in the stage based on the Pit from MK if you fired projectiles at the moon you'd be rewarded with another secret. The visuals were the most polished we've seen for the game to date on both platforms. The environments are detailed and feature a good measure of interactvity.

It was so difficult to pull this Mortal Kombat trick off that most players doubted it was even possible. But this was no simple wives' tale. If you satisfied a very specific set of requirements, you could face off against a green ninja at the bottom of the game's Pit stage. To face Reptile, first you had to be playing on one of the later revisions of the game. Then you had to fight on the Pit stage on one of those rare occasions when some shadowy item is flying in front of the moon. This didn't happen all that often, but when it did, you needed to beat your opponent without getting hit and without touching the block button.