Mortal Kombat 1 is a well needed breath of fresh air for the franchise that delivers smooth & brutal gameplay & brings the fighting game genre to new heights, except for when it doesn’t.

After being accidentally revealed in a Warner Bros. investments call, Mortal Kombat 1 was revealed to eagar fighting game fans in a pretty lukewarm fashion. Still, leave it to NetherRealm Studios to deliver back to back Mortal Kombat experiences that play & perform at two different playing fields, both of them being soaked in bloody chunks. However, for all the glitz & glamour that Mortal Kombat 1 exceeds at, there’s a feeling of uneasiness that surrounds the game, almost to a point where it feels almost rushed. If anything my issues with the game come down to two main problems, but they don’t take away from the flawless fighting & pure spectacle that is ripping off someone’s leg & feasting on the remains.

Bloody Good Time

Personally, I found the fighting to be a lot more fast paced but also one with a lot more strategy in how you choose to attack. Characters like Liu Kang have your atypical punches & throws that have their methods of being blocked, but then characters like Smoke arrive and have moves that start with you throwing a projectile that instantly teleports you on top of the enemy. Also characters have more anti-air moves that counter players that continuously jump and stay airborne (like Sindel) and punishes them severley. Comparing the play style to Mortal Kombat 11’s, you see that the older games give you a vast array of moves that have different effects but they each have their own pool of moves. In Mortal Kombat 11, someone like Kung Lao had a lot of projectile options, but could also teleport and perform close quarter moves. Mortal Kombat 1 provides him with his iconic hat toss, but his moveset is mainly focused on his martial art skills.

The roster of characters available are a great mesh of old classic characters (Kung Lao, Reptile, Baraka) alongside old favourites from the 3D era (Reiko, Ashrah, Nitara) and characters that either got introduced or a breath of fresh air from recent games (Kenshi, Geras, Shang Tsung). Even better, the addition of Kameo fighters allow more niche picks to be added to the game and gives the fighting more depth with new moves, fatalities, and acts more like an optional move that isn’t required to win fights. Stage selection totes eighteen stages at launch with additional stages available from playing the campaign & adequate modes, and the iconic banter between characters has been moved to the loading screen as a way to break up the monotony of waiting for the match to load and not having to skip the dialogue if you simply want to fight.

Performance wise, the game runs smoothly without any kickback. I played the game on PlayStation 5 and experienced no slowdown or any crashes pre-launch. I find that NetherRealm games have some of, if not the best graphics above any third party developers today, since they have the fighting down to a science, they can easily put more bodies on beefing up the graphics. Even considering how great Mortal Kombat 11‘s graphics were, I didn’t even think that they could improve, but yet here we are. Speaking of performances, character performances were great all around (most of the time). NetherRealm regulars like Andrew Bowen as Johnny Cage, Ike Amadi as Shao Kahn, and Steve Blum as Baraka are great as always. Newcomers like Daisuke Tsuji as Scorpion, and Yuri Lowenthal (a favourite of mine) as Smoke fit their roles well & it’s great to hear some diversity in the voice roles & how they approach the roles.

However, Megan Fox approached her role as Nitara and decided to not care. She is awful in this game, like she just read the lines for the first time & didn’t know she was being recorded. I mean at least Ronda Rousey tried in Mortal Kombat 11, and they are getting more A-List Celebrities like John Cena & J.K. Simmons for DLC characters, so I wonder why Fox was even asked to show up?

Mortal Kombat 11 1/2

(SPOILERS BELOW)

If anything else, I was more excited for the story of Mortal Kombat 1 above all else in this game. After the reset at the end of Mortal Kombat 11, how would this new era start off? Well for a good 10-11 chapters, I got exactly what I expected. The start of a new era, with some familiar beats as they battle a familiar foe in Shang Tsung. However, after Chapter 11 and after the big plot twist (the Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat 11 is still alive & had been manipulating events this whole time), the whole story just stops in it’s place and acts like a footnote on what the writers didn’t cram into the last game. We don’t learn anything more about Tarkat, the Outworld Invasion, the Lin Kuei insurrection, or anything brought up prior to Chapter 13. It becomes another multiverse story that feels like it comes from out of nowhere, yet it ends so anticlimactically. The final boss was also a push over, with almost every other NetherRealm boss being the culmination of what you’ve learned within the story, yet Shang Tsung went down in like two minutes. They even use Armageddon and push it off like no big deal. Honestly, it felt like NetherRealm & Warner Bros. had to clashing ideas for the story, with NRS wanting to continue what they’d established prior in the story, and WB wanting to do a multiverse story because Marvel did something similar, and WB won because they’re funding the game.

However, new to the Mortal Kombat series is Invasion mode, a single player progression based mode that changed every season. I saw it as the big new attraction for Mortal Kombat going forward, almost like NRS was staying “come for the campaign, stay for invasion mode”, and after playing it for a bit, I can say that I had fun with it, keyword “had”. It’s a fun mode, a bunch of small fights on a non linear map with each fight having its own twists and challenges, but after a while, I started to get bored. Each map, while different in tone & design, had me follow down a same path, fighting the same enemies, etc. Honestly, the only reason I kept going was to unlock more collectables, but that’s probably the only reason people would continue to play on.

Flawless Pay-tality

There’s been a trend that I’ve noticed within NetherRealm games in which diversity in customization is somehow some of the best & worst aspects of the games. Sure, there’s alot of options to choose in regards to gear, costumes, colours, intros, etc. Yet, in Mortal Kombat 1, a lot of the unlockable costumes are relegated to spots in a premium shop. By buying premium currency, you can pay and use skins that should be common place within the game, and the shop rotates daily like a violent version of Fortnite. I find this really fucking stupid and like Warner Bros. and NetherRealm are laughing at me for spending over $100 on their game and expecting me to pay more. It’d be one thing if the game was free and then I could justify the premium currency, but it becomes a problem when i’m being asked to pay for a premium Sub Zero mariachi skin when the game hasn’t officially launched yet. Otherwise, you’re limited to a shrine where you put in 1,000 coins, wait 10 seconds for an unskippable cutscene, and unlock your goodie (which usually ends up as character concept art 99% of the time). It limits everyone to using the same 1-2 skins and if you play online, it becomes a constant mirror match. Even unlocking fatalities and other skins using the mastery boards for each character (it’s a battle pass system) becomes a grind when I play as someone like Ashrah for 6 hours and barely crack 10 levels.

Overall, Mortal Kombat 1 is a great game, but that’s honestly the best compliment that I can give it. When I’m actually playing Mortal Kombat 1, it’s amazing don’t get me wrong, but unless i’m playing online against friends or randoms, most of my time is spent grinding out the lacklustre single player content. Combine this with the heavy monetization from customizing your fighters, the fact that the single player content isn’t as well realized as other games, and the way that the game was revealed, I feel that the executives at Warner Bros. just wanted to push out Mortal Kombat 1 as a moneymaker just to boost the yearly report. Honestly it’s sad but I hope that MK1 gets the same post launch love that MK11 got.

7/10

(Kombat Pack 2 got leaked, with Doomslayer, Noob Saibot, Guy Fieri, and literally anybody but Ash Williams expected to drop in 2069)