Mortal Kombat is my fighting franchise of choice and I picked up the newest entry, Mortal Kombat 1, earlier this month when it was on sale. After playing through Kingdom Come Deliverance in prep for starting KCD2, I needed a little pallette cleanser in between the two games.
The gameplay is what makes or breaks a fighting game. Mortal Kombat 1 doesn’t entirely reinvent the wheel, if you’ve played a previous MK game, you can pick up the combos and special moves pretty easily. Everything feels responsive and you can learn the basics of a character quickly. Some are more technical and do require a bit more practice to be good at. The fighters all seem fairly balanced. There weren’t any situations like in previous games where one or two characters felt unfairly powerful. Even the final boss wasn’t complete bullshit. The new mechanic here is the Kameo system. Basically, there’s a group of fighters that serve as your hype man. You can call them in to do a single attack or give you a buff. I found the system to be an afterthought that I would use on occasion. It replaces the environmental interactions from previous entries, which I would’ve preferred stayed around. The arenas do have some liveliness to them, with people in the background reacting to the fight going on.
MK1 also looks great. This is one of those games where when the scene lighting is just right, it almost looks like actual people acting in the cutscenes. Everything looks photorealistic, but everything is still readable, even with particle effects cluttering all over the screen.
Mortal Kombat 1 sees us in a world recreated by Liu Kang, now serving as this universe’s Raiden, after the events of MK11. This game serves as a soft reboot to the series. I’m not a hardcore MK fan who cares that much about the lore, so it was nice to see them give a new spin on old characters. Some get a fully rewritten backstory, like Reptile, who has always teetered between being a regular dude with reptile features and something more like the Lizard from Spider-man. Now he is a reptile that can shapeshift into a human. Johnny Cage is still an actor, but he doesn’t have the green magic powers, he also serves as the comic relief in the early game. They’ve also made Tarkatan a zombie like disease vs a race of creature, so Mileena is now the sister of Kitana who is infected with Tarkat. It creates this new world where we see fighters that were usually lesser bad guys in older games cast as allies of the heroes, like Reptile, Baraka, and Mileena. It was nice to see them shake up the formula. There’s also an origin story vibe because Kenshi shows up with his eyes intact and Raiden starts off sans lightning powers. I don’t think there are any new fighters in the roster, instead a lot are fighters from older games that haven’t shown up lately.
I also noticed the world was much more bright and lively than past MK games. Outworld used to often have a very Conan vibe, very brutal, deserty, landscapes. Now Outworld has a vibrant, fantastical vibe, like it could be a city pulled out of a Dragon Age game. I also noticed this game was a little lighter on the gore, it’s still there, but not as gratuitous. I wonder if these changes are the series maturing, because it wants to get away from the edgy and juvenile to tell more complex stories. Or if they are making MK a little more mass appeal friendly to synergize with the new movie coming out next year.
Character customization is one of my favorite parts of most games, and MK11 had a good mix of gear and outfit customization. MK1 drops the ball hard on this front. Most characters have only one or two outfits that come in different colors and one piece of gear you can customize. It means it’s hard to really make a fighter feel like your own, because there’s not much variety in skins. This game did strike a good balance of form and function when it comes to most of the outfits, the women don’t look like burlesque dancers like they did in MK9 and I like Raiden’s more practical human version of his godly robes.
The story is never the most important part of a fighting game, but MK1 does give it the good college try. Liu Kang has created a timeline that sees many of the former big bads of the MK franchise reduced to menial roles. The world enjoys relative peace and the combat tournaments aren’t to the death. Unfortunately, a mysterious stranger shows up and reminds Shang Tsung of the powerful wizard he used to be oin the old timeline. This starts the plot in motion. For the first half of the game, the story is relatively grounded, you could play through most of it without knowing the MK lore and enjoy it. They have pared back a lot of the extra fluff added over the years, the US spec ops and Black Dragons are gone, the Lin Kuei are the only ninja clan and all the Outworlds seem united. Liu Kang tries to find out who gave Shang Tsung his powers back while maintaining the delicate peace between Earth and Outworld. The cutscenes show the political machinations of this new world. It’s not West Wing, but it’s more than just fighting in a tournament. The reason for a fight was framed well enough within the story, with few “Hey, random person I don’t know, I’m gonna kick your butt”.
The second half is where the game starts to bring plot points from MK11 back. It seems like the mysterious stranger whose messing up Liu Kang’s world is Kronika somehow returned, but it turns out to be a Shang Tsung from another timeline. It makes this last section a multiverse storyline as is the style of the time. It does let them experiment with unique character designs like if Sindel had Reptile’s powers or Raiden Sub-Zero. There’s also a fun cameo of the Kombat Kids. Everything ends with a fight with Shang Tsung and then everything is back to normal.
I do think if the story wanted to go a little more philosophical, it would've been neat to see it go in a "you can't defeat fate" route where no matter how much Liu Kang tried to right the ship, events always find a way to play out in a similar way, instead of having a multiverse Shang Tsung interfering.
The guest fighters this time around are Ghostface, which horror icons always make the most sense in this world, Conan, another good fit and my favorite guest fighter to play as. There's also a smattering of superheroes: Homelander & Omniman make sense as sort of brutal heroes. And rounding it out is Peacemaker, who I don't much about besides that John Cena seemed to have fun recording the voice lines for this.
All in all, this game is another fine entry into the MK series. The fighting is as solid as ever and the gameplay is fun and fair. The story is engaging and I didn’t just skip through the cutscenes. The only let down is the paltry character customization options.
