I designed a fighting game when I was a kid. I was a huge Street Fighter fan and my dumb child brain was convinced that if I just drew up some characters and moves and mailed them off to Capcom they would almost certainly put them in their game. My cover letter read less like a pitch and more like a series of requests. “I have enclosed 26 characters for you to add to Street Fighter. Looking forward to seeing them in the next game.” I drew up character sheets, made up asinine special attack inputs, and wrote out back stories and endings for everyone. Eventually I assembled my masterpiece and asked my parents to mail it off to whoever made Street Fighter.
About a month later I got a letter from the president of Capcom! It read “Wow Jared, you did a great job with all these characters. I have sent them to our developers for further research. We have also included a copy of our latest game: Mortal Kombat.” Of course now, years later, I know that my parents saved whoever opened the mail at Capcom from reading my nonsense and instead opted to make me feel like less of a failure by giving me the gift of fatalities. And from that point on Mortal Kombat became my favorite game that my mother would always threaten to take away.
“I don’t like you playing that bee game.”
For awhile there Mortal Kombat had really gone off the rails. The game had a particularly tough time transitioning to 3D starting its new era off with the underwhelming Mortal Kombat 4 and getting progressively worse from there. By the time Deception rolled around I found myself constraining the series to weekend rentals only. This was until Mortal Kombat (9) blew onto the scene and gave the series a much needed reboot. Now for the first time in years I found myself hyped for the release of a Mortal Kombat game. Does X deliver? Well..yes and no.
Combat, oh sorry, I mean Kombat, in Mortal Kombat X will instantly feel familiar. All your staple moves are there: high kick, low kick, high punch, low punch, block. Running makes a return but is now mapped to a command instead of its own button. And of course, many of the characters you know and love in the series will be making a return to use these moves.
New to Mortal Kombat X, each character now has three different “variations” that you can choose from before fighting. These options can be simple enhancements like stronger projectiles, but they can also give characters entirely different weapons and movesets. For example, though Jade does not make an appearance in the game you can choose a variation for Kitana that will let you use her trademark staff. This not only adds a lot of variety to the roster, it also lets you adapt to other players and potentially turn bad matchups around without having to completely switch characters. It’s a great feature that adds a lot to the already fun combat.
The bulk of the game takes place twenty two years after the events shown in Mortal Kombat 9. This time jump allows many of the classic Mortal Kombat cast to produce offspring who make up the bulk of the new characters introduced in the game. Take for example Cassie Cage, the offspring of Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage, both of whom also appear in the game despite what must be some pretty killer midlife crises. The game offers twenty six playable characters right off the bat, eight of which are brand new to the series.
Story Mode makes a return in the game, and whether or not that’s good probably depends heavily on whether or not you’re a fan of Netherrealm’s storytelling methodologies. Mortal Kombat’s storyline has always been pretty goofy, but around 2004-2006 it almost certainly hit critical mass with story beats that wouldn’t have been out of place in my childhood pitch for Street Fighter 3. Mortal Kombat 9 did a pretty good job resetting the table, then it went ahead and made things just as convoluted and goofy as before. Mortal Kombat X does an admirable job of carrying the goofiness torch, characters are killed and revived almost at random throughout the game. By the end I could barely recall what went down, but I still found myself grateful for something to do as a single player.
In fact let me give credit where credit is due, Mortal Kombat games always have way more stuff to do than other fighting games. Hundreds of different unlockables like costumes, second fatalities, and concept art are tucked away inside the game’s Krypt. Story mode makes for a brief but fun distraction and the towers serve both as traditional arcade modes and as interesting challenges and diversions from the main game.
There’s a lot of nice things to say about Mortal Kombat X, the game controls nicely, has some of the best designed new characters Netherrealm has produced in years, and also includes some of the most creative and over the top fatalities to ever appear in the series. In fact it’s interesting to see just how far they’ve taken the violence. At one point I watched Liu Kang rip out someone’s windpipe and violently stuff it into their mouth before remarking that it was the tamest fatality I’d seen so far.
Now let’s talk about what I think is the game’s biggest flaw, its DLC model. First of all, if you’re reading this review it likely means you didn’t pre-order MKX which means right off the bat you’re going to have at least one empty spot in your character roster where Goro should be. He’ll be there of course, but the character is grayed out and when hovering over it you’re simply prompted to “press X to purchase Goro”, and act that will charge your credit card for $4.99. Now that the game has been patched a few weeks later you’ll also notice blank spots for Tanya, Tremor, Predator, and Jason Voorhees. These characters can also be purchased in the “Kombat Pack” which will set players back $29.99.
Maybe Capcom has conditioned us all to be used to on-disc DLC in our fighting games by now, but I still felt a little twinge of annoyance when Tanya (who won’t even be released for a few weeks) popped up to fight me in the game’s story mode. The character is obviously mostly done in the game, and it really lends itself to that feeling that the game was chopped up into pieces to make DLC instad of the content being created after the development process. To make matters worse, Sindel, Baraka, and Rain all make appearances as enemies in story mode and have already been made playable by modders. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if they wound up being released later at a cost, maybe even in a second Kombat Pack.
Get used to empty spots on your character roster unless you shell out a bunch more money.
I played Mortal Kombat X primarily on the PS4, but it’s also worth noting the game’s considerable troubles in its port to PC. First there was the experimental installation method that wound up locking players out of certain sections of the game on day one, then we have numerous reports of performance problems and crashes regardless of GPU, and who could forget that classic 15 GB patch that wiped away the save data of anyone who downloaded it. Seriously, if you’re considering picking this game up and your only option is the PC you can probably just forget about it.
I also took issue with the game’s tutorial mode. It makes a pretty huge jump from showing you how to punch and kick to having you string together juggle combos and cancel out of throws. While I appreciate them covering more advanced concepts they don’t do a great job of explaining the purposes behind them. So for example they explain how to cancel out of a move, but never really get into what benefit there is to doing so. If you’re new to fighting games and want to learn some more advanced concepts Mortal Kombat X is not going to be a great teacher. I also found that a lot of the more advanced combos were very hard to pull off without a fight stick, something else to keep in mind if you’re wanting to get serious about this sort of stuff.
I largely consider review scores to be a general representation of whether or not I would recommend that someone buy the game in question, and in all honestly despite how fun Mortal Kombat X is, it’s impossible to recommend it when I’m all but certain that a more complete version will be released next year at a substantially cheaper price. As it stands right now you would need to spend almost one hundred dollars on the game just to make sure you didn’t have blank spots in your character roster. If you’re a fan of the series and can’t bear to wait this is probably for you, but for casual passerbys it’s impossible for me to recommend purchasing the game, and god help you if you’re on PC.
