MDK 2: Armageddon

Written by John Scalzo  on June 16, 2001

Full Review: I think MDK stands for Mighty Damn Kool.

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After vanquishing the alien threat at the end of the first MDK, you'd think our hero Kurt could relax. But no! There are more aliens in Sector 8675309 (insert your own lame 80s joke here), so dust off that chain gun, the fight against the aliens is back on.

MDK 2 is actually a lot like the original MDK. The controls are totally the same. It's your basic action game package. Run, jump, shoot stuff, except now with the addition of the analog sticks, the second stick is used to control the camera, very nifty. But the average gamer should have it picked up in no time. The graphics are also like the original, but cleaned up to reflect the power of the PS2. Before everything was rather dull and blocky. But now on MDK 2, there is lots of different colors and smooth clean graphics. Everything is done on a large scale. The giant explosions make their return as well, but greatly improved with the PS2s increased graphical power. The giant bosses are a throwback to the old school days of gaming when you were this little guy and the bosses were the size of the screen. One of them even bears more than a little passing resemblence to Unicron from The Transformers.

But maybe I should back up a minute and tell you the story. Aliens have invaded Earth, and it is up to you to save the world. Yup, that's it, no huge confusing narrative, this is an action game folks, and heavy on the action. But anyway, our world savers are again janitor Kurt, Dr. Hawkins and Max (although this time Dr. Hawkins and Max are playable characters). But I think Max is quite possibly one of the coolest characters to ever grace a video game screen. He's a cigar chomping, two legged, four armed mutant dog with a pistol in each hand. And not only is he packing heat, but he's packing an attitude. It's goofy little touches like this that make this game incredibly fun.

The sounds and music are your fairly standard action game stuff. Although what's not standard is the occasional farting noise when an alien jumps on you. That's a new one for the action game. And another new one is that the cut scenes and full motion video moments do feature some nice voice acting. In fact, I was laughing out loud at the cut scene to start level 2. Max comes flying in riding a rocket firing guns in each paw. It was great and these three characters are actually funny. But maybe the days of the bad in game movies are finally coming to an end, hmmm.

This game is hard. But old school hard. It's not like today's games that are hard because of the game's crappy controls, confusing scenarios or because you can't find this key that goes to that door. But an old school kinda hard because there's 20 aliens shooting at you and you can't make the jump all because you wasted all your jet pack fuel. Basically, MDK 2 is your standard entry in the shoot everything that moves (and some things that don't) genre of games. This genre is greatly underrepresented in all of today's next-gen systems. We need more games like MDK 2.