Mortal Kombat: Armageddon

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon from 2006 closed out the so-called "vs" era of the series by cramming practically every playable character from previous entries into a single game – over sixty fighters, including long-forgotten nineties faces who would otherwise never have appeared in a newer game again. Midway deliberately gave up on building a new central story around a single hero and instead offered a grand finale for the series, in which all the fighters battle over the fate of existence itself, while a side plot around new hero Taven, son of the god Argus, ties the individual factions and old rivalries together into one shared conflict over the fate of the entire multiverse.

A new feature was the Kreate-a-Fatality mode, which let players assemble their own finishing combination from a library of moves instead of memorizing a fixed sequence for every character individually, and an expanded Konquest mode turned into a more open 3D adventure with side quests and item collecting across the whole game map, in which the player traveled between the multiverse's individual regions and gradually unlocked new fighters and combat abilities for Taven himself. The game also offered a bonus racing minigame, Motor Kombat, in which the series' characters raced on go-karts, which was seen at the time as recycling an idea from other series, but still gave players extra hours outside the main fighting mode, as well as a gallery of unlockable concept art and old videos from the series' history that players could browse between fights.

Why play it: Armageddon is best suited for fans who want to see a complete parade of fighters from the entire nineties and early-2000s era of Mortal Kombat in one place, rounded out by the ability to design your own fatalities and a more extensive Konquest adventure – a fitting full stop for the series' old era before its 2011 reboot.