Mortal Kombat Advance is a fighting video game developed by Virtucraft and published by Midway Games for the Game Boy Advance in North America in December 2001. It is part of the Mortal Kombat series of fighting games. It is a handheld version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, although it was designed with the intention of evoking the best aspects of the first three games in the series and Mortal Kombat Trilogy.
Mortal Kombat Advance allows players to take control of one of multiple playable characters, who fights against a computer-controlled or player-controlled opponent one-on-one. The game allows players to use various combo moves, as well as fatalities at the end of the fight. Due to the Game Boy Advance having fewer buttons than the arcade cabinets the translated games originally appeared on, the designers had to modify how the game controlled.
Upon release, Mortal Kombat Advance was negatively received, holding a 33/100 score on Metacritic, which the site characterizes as “generally unfavorable reviews.” It was largely criticized for poor controls, the limitations of the Game Boy Advance, and poorly made artificial intelligence for computer-controlled opponents. The game also received extremely low scores in Electronic Gaming Monthly. It has been regarded as the worst game of 2002 by GameSpot and one of the worst games of all time by GamesRadar+.
Gameplay
Mortal Kombat Advance is based on Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and allows players to control one of multiple playable characters in one-on-one fights against either computer-controlled or player-controlled opponents. The objective is to completely deplete the opponent’s health bar, while preventing them from depleting the player character’s health bar. This can be accomplished using both simple attacks as well as combo techniques, which are done using button command combinations. A character must defeat the opponent at least twice in order to win the match. Players are then given either “Finish Him” or “Finish Her” prompts, at which point they may either attack them normally or perform a button combo to initiate a Fatality, which ends the fight in a more brutal way.
