Back when I was a very young and impressionable child, I enjoyed playing the Mortal Kombat games on SNES. I enjoyed it more than Street Fighter 2 at the time because it felt a lot more satisfying to hear the crunch of an uppercut in Mortal Kombat, or the screams of someone landing on spikes, than a boring shoryuken. Obviously I didn’t buy it myself, my parents loved gaming so they bought it for themselves and I mooched off of their stuff growing up, and that’s why the SNES games were my only foray into the Mortal Kombat universe for many years. While I wasn’t paying attention, the series got stuck into a really awful holding pattern of mediocre title after mediocre title. It was finally pulled out of that rut in 2011 when they retcon’d the entire series and did quite an excellent job with Mortal Kombat 9. It returned to the 2D fighting style and actually had a pretty decent story for a fighting game. The enormous backlog of characters and plots created during those off years really built a good universe to pull stories and ideas from. That game made everybody love Mortal Kombat again, and that’s a tough proposition for any sequel to live up to.
Story
Mortal Kombat X follows the same idea of 9 of having chapters dedicated to each specific character. The main plot of this game follows Shinok’s quest to take over Earthrealm. He’s evil and he wants to take the lifeforce of our realm to become more evil. It’s a bit boring of an idea, but the character interactions and dialogue and how every scene keeps unfolding makes it interesting to keep playing.
It follows the common cast of people that weren’t killed off last game, with new characters introduced as sons and daughters of the original characters in scenes that take place 20 years in the future. The story is definitely interesting enough to keep your attention, though some parts do feel like the game is rushing past to get to the next chapter. There are also a lot of characters that you don’t even get to play as during the story, like my favorite Ermac, but it’s probably better than being shoehorned in just for the sake of it.
Mortal Kombat X doesn’t have the greatest plot, but the personality of the characters and just seeing how each cutscene turns into a fight keeps it interesting enough to see through to the end. Also the length of it doesn’t make it that hard either. You could probably beat it under two hours or so.
Gameplay
Mortal Kombat stands out from other fighting game titles like Street Fighter and Soul Calibur by having combos mainly based around premade target combos. Because of that, the combat is extremely easy to pick up for a new player as opposed to something like Street Fighter where it’s a lot more free and you have to figure out everything on your own. It’s a lot easier to do combos and link them together, in this, so you won’t have much trouble playing the game if you’re new to it.
The characters are all nicely varied, and some different changes have been made to them from the previous Mortal Kombat. You can now choose your style of play for each character. The style you choose effects your special attacks by either enhancing ones that are already there or giving you entirely new ones. A lot of times, at least by my standards, the best choice is usually common sense and I was never torn over two different choices, but depending on how you play, you might be conflicted.
Taking about characters, i have to mention the heavy emphasis placed on DLC in this game. I’m a bit negative towards DLC in general, but I do appreciate the effort put in to spice up the game later on in the release of a game. In story mode you fight against characters like Rain, whom you can’t play yourself yet, and he’s going to most definitely be DLC down the road. The character is basically done, people have modded the game so you can play as him, but they’re just holding him back so you have to pay money for him. You needed to pre-order Mortal Kombat’s enhanced edition to get Goro as well, and then a couple other DLC characters were announced before the game came out. It makes you feel like you’re not playing a complete game and getting your money’s worth when the knowledge the inevitable complete edition will drop in a few months with all the DLC included.
When playing the single player modes like story and ladders, you’ll have to deal with the ai. Fighting game ai is notoriously bad, and this one definitely has a few hiccups. The one i noticed the most was with characters that grapple attacks that require you to press buttons. You hold onto your opponent and mash a couple times to hurt them, but the bots see these moves as a chance to go grab a snack or something because they take so long to do it.
After finishing the story off, you still have a lot of modes to choose from. You could do the classic tower battles, which give you challenges and objectives to complete in a fight, you could go to the Krypt and unlock extra content like alternate costumes, or you can go play multiplayer.
Mortal Kombat I would think is a lot more acceptable and easy to pick up for new players, so I would prefer taking this over to a friend’s house rather than Street Fighter. Acceptable as in ease of playing of course. It’s mortal Kombat so it’s a bit gruesome, obviously, so some people may dislike that. However, Mortal Kombat is great for causal play if you want to sit around and get by mashing on some buttons with other people. That does mean though the professional scene is a lot less limited than Capcom developed fighters or games with Smash in the title, so if you’re looking to become a fighting game wizard you should direct your efforts elsewhere. But it still does have an established group of dedicated players on TestYourMight.com.
Online play ran pretty smoothly besides one or two people I was matched up with, but on PC at least, it kept taking a really long time to find anyone in the basic ranked mode even though there were around 7000 something people playing at the time. We’ll see how Mortal Kombat holds up in the long run, but a lot of the times fighting games get abandoned on PC. Injustice: Gods Among Us, another game developed by the Mortal Kombat people, doesn’t even have enough people playing at the same time to show up on steam charts anymore. You can find people in Ultra Street Fighter 4 on PC, but other things like Skullgirls don’t have enough people playing at the same time to make it a worthwhile online experience, and I can’t say for certain but there’s the possibility Mortal Kombat may follow.
Also on Steam, the developers made an extremely poor decision to do a sort of streaming download system. Basically you download the base game which is around 3 gigs. With the base game you can’t play most of the levels, a few characters, any story mode or online mode, and it’s pretty much pointless. To get the rest of the game oyu have to look under the DLC section. There you’ll find around 30 extra gigabytes in 29 dlc packs. You have to download each pack to play everything else, and it was so annoying for me. I finished downloading everything after a couple hours, but the game was buggy and it kept telling me that all the packs weren’t downloaded. so my only course of action was to uninstall everything and then reinstall it again. It finally worked after that, but it was needlessly complicated for them to do this.
Mortal Kombat X has fun gameplay. While the fighting game enthusiast in me prefers Street Fighter, the gamer in me definitely prefers Mortal Kombat. It’s a lot more fun at a basic level than many other fighters could be. However, while there are few negatives with the game itself, I take issue with anything the game has done relating to DLC. The streaming download system was a bad idea, and the knowledge that extra characters are going to be released down the road keeps nagging me in the back of my head. It feels like I’m playing an incomplete game that I paid 60 dollars for.
Graphics and Design
Mortal Kombat has decent graphics, though it’s very poorly optimized on PC. It sometimes just straight up refuses to start, it crashed my video card drivers, it does a weird skipping thing at the beginning of single player battles sometimes. After lowering my quality settings down a lot, I was surprised at just how.. moist the game is. It looks like everyone is glistening in every scene like this is oil wrestling or something. But the graphics aren’t that bad. I just dislike how dark the entire game is. This level where you’re at Raiden’s temple has all this rain pouring in front of your characters so it makes it difficult to really discern what is happening.
Conclusion
I know i tend to focus on the negatives in my reviews, but Mortal Kombat itself is a nicely made game. While i prefer street fighter style games with more freedom in combo creation as a fighting game enthusiast, Mortal Kombat is really fun and easy to play for me as a general gamer. It may be poorly optimized, it might have crappy AI, and the story could be a bit longer, but i thoroughly enjoyed what I played of this entry in the series. The main problems i do have with Mortal Kombat are based around things about the game rather than in it. I dislike the heavy emphasis of DLC, the streaming download system on PC was a mistake, and the game crashing many times left a bad taste in my mouth. Besides the few flaws, the game is great otherwise and you’ll definitely enjoy it, but if you don’t need it today, a few months down the road the inevitable enhanced edition with all the DLC included might be the better purchase.
