Mortal Kombat X Review
Mortal Kombat X is an incredibly solid fighting game that does more than enough to appeal to fans of the series and welcome newcomers alike. Like its predecessor from 2011, MKX is packed with an almost intimidating amount of content as the team at Netherrealm studios continue to go above and beyond what’s expected out of your run of the mill fighting game. While I do lament the loss of a traditional challenge tower like that found in Mortal Kombat 9 or even Injustice: Gods Among us, I still feel that if you’re looking for a fighting game, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better one than Mortal Kombat X.
Set 25 years after the events of Mortal Kombat 9, Mortal Kombat X follows a new cast of characters as they attempt to stop the fallen elder-god Shinnok from taking over the realms. Along the way the characters will face civil unrest in Outworld, imprisonment and maybe even fall in love. The story of Mortal Kombat X hits the notes of any number of dumb action blockbusters, and it’s awesome. The new characters weave into the fiction nicely and are more suitable to universe than much of the roster of the PS2/Xbox era Mortal Kombat games. A big relief if the prospect of new characters in a Mortal Kombat game had you as worried as it did me. The story is not entirely focused on the new characters however. Instead, it will take you through twelve chapters with a healthy mix of new and classic kombatants which is cinematic as it is functional being that it provides you with enough time to get a feel for a good chunk of the characters.
In addition to the story mode, Mortal Kombat X also features an array of towers. You can play through traditional towers with each fighter culminating in unique character endings, mash buttons and pull triggers in the increasingly difficult ‘Test Your Luck’ tower, or fight onslaughts of enemies in the ‘Survivor’ and ‘Endless towers. The most interesting among them however, are the ‘Living Towers’. These are unique challenge towers which will change intermittently. Some weekly and some as quickly as on the hour, each with its own theme. In one tower you might start with no health, gaining it as long as you don’t take a hit. Another might have you fight while rockets are raining from the sky. Personally, I’m of two minds with these towers. The prospect of endless challenges to come out of a Mortal Kombat game is exciting to me. I found that when I had completed the challenges in Mortal Kombat 9, I didn’t hang around for very much longer outside of some online matches here and there. On the other hand, I really loved the challenge tower in Mortal Kombat 9 in a way that the living towers just aren’t doing it for me. Many of the challenges in Mortal Kombat 9 had some unique dialogue at the beginning which added a certain charm that’s just absent from these challenges. Still, it is nice to know that every time I boot up Mortal Kombat, there will be another challenge tower to best. Each of these towers is ranked on a leaderboard as well, so you can see your overall score and how much your actions have aided your faction, another new addition to the game.
When you first launch Mortal Kombat X, you’ll be asked to pick from a list of factions, like the Lin Quei, Red Dragon, Special Forces etc. Everything you do in Mortal Kombat X, from single player fights to online battles earns you faction points which go to aiding your faction in the war that’s happening in the background week to week. At the end of the faction war a winner is chosen based on how many points are accumulated by each group. Along the way there will be events like invasions from other factions which open up unique faction towers (which are basically just another challenge tower). They also bring in boss fights which challenge each faction to a one-on-one fight with a single - immensely strong - character. Everyone does chip damage to the character who is heavily shielded, which is all accumulated at the end of the invasion. Whichever faction did the most cumulative damage wins. These are interesting ideas which are welcome and provide meaning to the faction meta-game happening in the background, but in the end are not what bring me to Mortal Kombat.
When it comes down to it, Mortal Kombat is (and always has been) about fighting, which has never been more fun or polished as it is in Mortal Kombat X. The game plays as you would expect if you’re familiar with Mortal Kombat 9, that is two kicks, two punches a block and a super meter, though there have been some changes since 2011. First of all, the game feels significantly faster than it did several years ago. It feels closer to the speed of the team’s last game, Injustice: God’s Among Us. Speaking of, Netherrealm has obviously learned a lot from their work on Injustice as level interactions have been gleaned right out of it. If your fighter is backed into a corner or near a potential weapon, you can press the right shoulder button to escape or take a swing at your opponent. I was a big fan of interactables in Injustice, and they’re a welcome addition to Mortal Kombat X. The addition of a run function and stamina meter seem somewhat superfluous to me however, and I never found myself all too concerned with either of them. Still, Mortal Kombat’s easy to pick up, difficult to master fighting style is in full force, and the intricate ways that you can string combos into special moves still feels fantastic. Coupled with the fact that each character has 3 fighting variations that change their move sets and it’s clear that there is quite a bit of depth to be found in Mortal Kombat X, especially evident in the myriad of finishing moves.
Like in Mortal Kombat 9, each character has two standard fatalities. What’s new to Mortal Kombat X however is the introduction of ‘brutalities’, which require you to complete a set of stipulations throughout the fight to end with a quick - but over the top - death. These are not quite as elaborate as the fatalities, but are perhaps more rewarding as if you want to pull them off, you might have to change up the way you fight to meet certain requirements. You’re also given a set of ‘faction kills’ depending on which faction you ally yourself with. These are somewhat less interesting than the fatalities and brutalities, but since they’re the same across all characters, you end up seeing a lot of these online. The finishing moves in the game are as gory and over the top as ever, but are maybe not the grossest thing about Mortal Kombat X.
The final thing I’ll say about Mortal Kombat X is somewhat disappointing. Disappointing because I love Mortal Kombat as a franchise and some of its storefront stuff left a really bad taste in my mouth. See, the team at Netherrealm has created an incredibly elaborate way to unlock items in the game. The Krypt this time around is designed like a first-person adventure game with light puzzle solving (think Legend of Grimrock). However after I had been playing for a while I realized that I wasn’t unlocking items nearly as quick as I would have in previous games. “Oh well,” I thought, “at least you get koins for basically everything you do in the game.” Which is true, but when you’re getting somewhere in the area of the low thousands for completing towers, and items in the krypt are costing upwards of tens of thousands, then you start to realize that unlocking everything in the game is going to take you quite a while. Or, for the low price of $19.99, you can purchase an item that unlocks everything in the krypt for you. This is insane considering the amount of work that obviously went into a mode designed to unlock finishing moves and costumes. The price of these unlocks becomes extra grimy when you’re given the option to just buy them all up for real money. The game just seems rotten with this sort of monetization to the point where there are two advertisements for downloadable characters on the main screen at any given time, and you can purchase ‘easy fatality coins’ should putting in a button combination at the end of a match prove a little too trying. These micro (and not so micro) transactions are really unfortunate in this game because I expect better from something like Mortal Kombat and are kind of a damper on an otherwise stellar product.
Despite some of the game’s storefront stuff, Mortal Kombat X is still a fantastic game. The story is a blockbuster thrill ride, the challenges are sure to add some longevity to the game and the fighting is tighter than its ever been. The new characters Netherrealm has worked into the Mortal Kombat universe fit really well and are actually some of my favourite to fight with. While the network has experienced some hiccups in the early days of release, there hasn’t been anything major enough to ruin my experience online. Occasionally the living towers wouldn’t load at all, but this is a rare occurrence and generally works after a few attempts. If you’re a fan of Mortal Kombat, then there’s no reason that you shouldn’t pick this game up. There’s enough going on that it should hold your interest for a good while. Still, the game is accessible enough that newcomers to the series will be able to pick it up right away and have a good time and I still can’t imagine someone seeing some of the gorier parts of Mortal Kombat X and not laughing and grimacing at the same time. Mortal Kombat X is a hell of a game.
