Of all the RTK series to remake, it makes sense for Koei to return to this one. By far probably the best in the series, only held back by fairly dry and dated visuals. If you can get past the fairly humdrum look of everything here, there's a deep and endlessly replayable game here with lots of depth, facets and complexity. And better yet, it's multiplayer! So if you have bunch of brain-rotted RTK fans as friends as i do, you can all play together.
I have many memories of me and my mates deciding to play as 3 mediocre officers, and doing our best to prop up some lackluster lord who by all rights should collapse five minutes into the game.

The best "faction-mode" game in the series, and has in my opinion, some of the best systems in the series.
The decision to combine the battles and the overall map into one board is smart, i really enjoy how battles work in this one. Where tactics and battles are a great deal about placement, preparation and what types of army you field. Lu Bu on one hand can smash everything to pieces and do crazy damage, however a bunch of archer turrets, a choke point, and some mid-tier guy with 70/100 war can beat Lu Bu.
The dueling and debating mini-games here are the best the series has had. They are easy to wrap your head around, and you actually feel like your input matters, i wish they would just use these as standard going forward.

Downsides? Well, the game's AI can be downright terrible. Weaker factions will attack you once, and then never try to recover. They'll sit with a half-empty city and make no effort to recover while you build up and smash them to bits.
Also, the lack of an option to randomize placement here means that replay-value is lesser than the officer-mode entries, it's still quite a lot to try, but i can't help but wonder how much better it'd be with a randomizer.

Boils down and simplifies far too much to the point of making things repetitive and boring. Tasks are now turned into tedious exercises in waiting for circles to fill and unfill.
Battles again are repetitive and dumbed down, there's not much involved you just sort of move your circle around, and watch numbers go down.
Duels, which in previous games are exciting and sort of rare; here they're annoying and frequent, if you play any sort of warrior or general, you're going to be dueling the same 3 bandits over and over again, in a system that just feels flipping a coin most of the time.
I personally don't care for the pause/play gameplay used here, i preferred the turn-based previous games, i really don't think it adds anything worthwhile to this series.

Positives: The visuals are nice, the new artwork is great, granted it was introduced in the previous game (which i don't own), and makes this always tempting to return to for just how expressive and interesting the character artwork is.
The return of the officer mode adds a great deal of replay value, added to this is an option to randomize faction placement, which means you'll not run out of stuff to try.

Overall, a shiny but weaker entry in the series.

A real mixed bag. Probably the worst MK roster ever. And while i don't mind the combat in the ps2 era, here the problems are at their most noticeable. Impaling is really busted, the AI is very inconsistent, the weird abilities like shoving and powering up are strange additions which correctly vanish going forward.
The way combo's are detected here is fucked up too, and again i noticed it getting fixed for deception. In deception you simply input the command and watch it go, but here you have to line up presses with animations which fucks everything up.

However, i do like it's chill konquest mode with it's little monk guy, and this probably has the best soundtrack in the series. I also really love Shang Tsung's outfit here.

Of the ps2 MK set this one falls under deception for me, while the roster, kart, create a character features are welcome, i do have issues elsewhere.

The konquest mode at first glance is an improvement over Deception's, however i find it to lack the nonlinearity and replayability of deception. One straight playthrough of Armageddon's konquest mode netted me all but 4 of the extra costumes, several arenas, all 4 hidden characters, and a metric fuck ton of money.
This strips much of the rewards out of playing the other modes i would argue, and i just can't help feel Armageddon would have benefited from having like half of it's characters as unlockables, just so you're busy doing things.
Deception's konquest for all it's goofyness, would barely give you anything if you didn't comb through the environments thoroughly.

I still love this game really, it's nice having everyone here, but after playing these 3 back to back, the konquest mode's rewards stuck in my craw.

In my humble opinion, one of the best games ever made.

In terms of just sheer variety of gameplay, story, visuals, style, it's hard to think of many games that match up with this.

There's a real magic to the way it bounces so effortlessly from 1930s gangster stuff in Chicago, to Gothic Undead Horror in 1800's Notre dame, to Sci-Fi Terminator-Future War. Each with it's own gameplay, music, visual look, array of time period correct weapons. In Chicago you'll meet an informant, bust up barrels of liquor, whereas in the robot factory you'll control laser-turret cameras, and fight a giant drill-armed machine boss. One is moody with a noir sort of jazz OST, and the other features pounding techno bass.

All this is held up with a tight responsive control scheme, a huge array of unlockable content, a side arcade league mode filled with bots to face off against, challenge mode content. But best of all a full comprehensive multiplayer, that practically never stops being fun.

I can easily return to this game whenever, it's perfect.

I think this one is very underrated. In general i think the gen 6 MK series is better than people give credit for. Particularly this one, you're spoiled for content, you have the core fighting game experience, namely arcade etc. But also included is a puzzle konbat mode which is lots of fun, a chess kombat mode which reminds me of unholy war on the ps1 or something similar. But the big one is the revamped konquest mode.
The konquest mode is now a full fledged game in of itself, basically a tutorial for playing every character blended with a open world adventure and story. I genuinely think this is the best feature of the game; as what you get out of it, is probably the most chilled out fighting game experience possible. It's honestly very zen, there's virtually no konsequences (hehe) to loss or failure, and you're free to roam around collecting currency for the vast unlockables, doing fun little quests and taking in the very calming atmosphere, never has hell itself been so chill.