Mortal Kombat 1 Trip Report (Patreon)

After spending a bunch of time with it over the last three or so days, I feel pretty well-versed in Mortal Kombat 1’s modes and options. I feel quite good about them, in fact! However, since the game isn’t out yet (and the online servers were down the day I got the game), I haven’t been able to touch any of the online stuff yet. This is, obviously,. the key to if the game will have the right kind of longevity or not. Based on time with the pre-order beta, I think things will probably be fine, but to break that down a bit:

1. The netcode in the pre-order beta seemed fine.
2. The online lives or dies by your ability to find players of a similar skill level to fight against.

Now, that second one is true of just about any games, but I’m underscoring it here because when playing in the beta, you tend to find a bunch of self-selecting players who sought out the beta and, well, are significantly better than I am. I have not had much fun getting stomped out in MK1’s two betas. Some fighting games are good at making losses feel like learning experiences, but the lengthy combos and juggles of Mortal Kombat’s more recent releases make the losses feel more discouraging than other games. That said, in MK11 it felt like there were always people at or around my skil level to play, even years after its release. Assuming this game finds the same wide popularity that the previous one did, this will be something of a non-issue. Either way, I haven’t seen how the final game plays online, so know that going in.

While Mortal Kombat 1 is presented as a new beginning, it is very much a direct sequel to Mortal Kombat 11 and its story-finishing DLC, Aftermath. At the end of Aftermath, Liu Kang defeated the evil timekeeper, Kronika, and became the new keeper of time. Time itself spun apart, leaving it to Liu Kang to create an entirely new timeline. And so he does, and this alternate universe contains twists on the characters you’ve come to know over the past 30 years. For starters, Raiden is just some guy, essentially swapping roles with Liu Kang, who is now the protector of Earthrealm and, you know, taking over Raiden’s old role. Scorpion and Sub-Zero are brothers, both members of the Lin Kuei, though Sub-Zero is the clan’s grandmaster. And Shang Tsung has been reduced to a huckster, peddling scam cures from town to town to get by… though this changes. The story very much feels like it’s playing around in the “yes, you can change things about a timeline, but some things are more or less destined to pass no matter what” space while also spending a lot of time on the sort of multiverse/multiple timeline concepts that has been all the rage lately.

The story is Mortal Kombat 1 is engaging and charming. It’s fun to watch this cast of characters interact in new ways, some with entirely new origins, as well. The interactions between Kenshi and Johnny Cage, for example, make for an interesting mix of an original character and a much newer one, and they do a great job of making Kenshi feel like a main, core character. Along the way you’ll also encounter Ashrah, Li Mei, Nitara, and other characters who made their debuts during the Deadly Alliance era on PS2 and Xbox. Those games… haven’t aged well. But seeing some of those characters come forward into the modern games has been really cool, and their places in the story make them feel right at home alongside all the series stalwarts. Though I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to hearing characters in an MK game talk about “Orderrealm” and some of the other, goofier-sounding places that surfaced during those games. The voice acting and performances are good across the board, though Nitara feels weird, mostly because the vocal performance feels very out-of-place, like they wanted Nitara—some kind of evil vampire lady—to sound like a Valley Girl or a cheerleader or something.

The story mode is structured like the previous games, with you jumping from character to character across the 15 chapters. This used to feel like a bit of a tutorial, giving you time with a lot of different characters, but here you play as characters who might not have gained their full powers yet at that place in the story, so you end up playing, for example, a Raiden that doesn’t have any electricity powers. Or a Mileena who can’t execute enhanced specials because a plot thing hasn’t happened to her yet. But the game doesn’t immediately tell you this. Either way, it’s a really fun jaunt through a compelling story that culminates in what can only be called the wildest chunk of fan service the Mortal Kombat series has ever seen.

You may notice that the game has an achievement for finishing Chapter 15 twice. I will avoid getting into why, but I will say that once you’ve seen this part of the story, you will very much want to play it at least one more time. It’s my favorite thing they’ve ever put into a Mortal Kombat story. It’s deliriously over-the-top and I’d love to see them base entire modes around this concept in the future. When I finally got to this point while finishing up the story last night, I kept looking around for another person so I could say “are you seeing this shit right now?” My son was asleep, though, so… his loss, really.

The rest of the game’s solo features and modes are interesting, though maybe not as immediately flashy as something like the krypt has been in previous games. The main new mode to play once you’ve finished the story is called Invasions. This appears to be a season-based, live-game-like mode where you move around on a board game-like path and encounter various fights with modifiers. In this way, it’s pretty similar to the sorts of tower modes and things that Mortal Kombat has had for years. You’ll run into weird modifiers like “hey, occasionally a bat flies overhead and spits fire down at the fighters” or, more commonly, your opponent will have super armor. You can find items that, when equipped, give you bonus stats or moves.

Invasion mode also sets up some elemental affinities that give you a reason to switch fighters from time to time. Electricity, for example, is strong against ice, so if you’re facing a Sub-Zero, you might want to swap to Raiden. All of the character stats and equipment all that eventually starts to feel like slightly more management than I’m interested in doing, but if you’re the sort of player who loves to min-max stuff like this, you’ll probably have fun swapping everything around to make it just right before you go into a fight.

OK, so how about the fighting itself? Mortal Kombat 1 feels more explicitly focused on mid-air combos, meaning that after an enemy gets popped up in the air, you can jump up to chase them and unload a few mid-air hits. Like previous games, you can execute enhanced versions of your special moves by burning one chunk of meter, and this will change the properties of some moves. Some enhanced moves are good for extending combos, others are perhaps better for ending them with a little extra damage. Some are even more situational, like Sub-Zero’s slide, which swaps sides with your opponent when enhanced. By and large, if you’ve played NetherRealm’s games over the past decade or so, a lot of these mechanics will feel familiar.

The new things, then, are the kameo fighters. While Mortal Kombat 1 isn’t a tag game, you always select a second character from a separate roster of these assist characters. And then, provided your kameo meter isn’t drained, you can tap a button and a direction to call in your assistant. Cyrax can immobilize enemies with his net if you hit back and the kameo button, but just pressing the button brings him out with a bomb, which can also hit you, if you aren’t careful. These assist characters are fun additions to the roster that often come with a good chunk of nostalgia attached, as each kameo fighter shows up in throws, in fatal blow attacks, and more. Kameo fighters also bring a fatality, and this is where some of the goofier fatalities, like Jax growing gigantic and smashing the victim with his boot, come into play. While the story mode isn’t explicitly about the kameo fighters and where they come from, they fit into the narrative’s multiverse mentality just fine. You’ll see MK1 Scorpion in there, MK2 Jax, MK3 Stryker, Deception Darrius, Shujinko, Sareena… it’s an eclectic list, for sure.

It’s going to take a little more time for me (or, honestly, players far better than me) to figure out the best ways to use each assist attack, but the basic idea is that they’ll give you a few more moves that can help round-out your options. At this point, I just keep picking Cyrax because his fatality is easy to do and his net seems useful when I remember to do it. Also I originally thought the game was going to have a much larger roster of kameos than it appears to. On top of that, a handful of them need to be unlocked, seemingly by leveling up your user profile. A quick note here that unlike previous games from the studio, the story mode doesn’t seem to get you any profile XP (though you will unlock some new colors and cosmetic items for most of the main roster).

Visually, the game is really quite striking. There’s a sharpness and detail to the backgrounds and characters that previous games just didn’t have. I suppose you could chalk that up to the tech changes they made or perhaps the notion that the game is primarily designed for current consoles. The fidelity is really something. That, naturally, parlays into the fatal blows and fatalities, which are about as gruesome as they’ve ever been, though at this point I’m losing track of the number of different ways Scorpion has shot spears into the eyes or neck or head of his opponent as a part of a finisher. At some point they all just sort of run together, so it’s nice that some of the kameo fighters have goofier finishers, like Cyrax blowing up the planet (even though that’s a Smoke thing, don’t even try to talk to me about Mortal Kombat Gold, leave me alone). The soundtrack is hard-hitting and there are even some nice little audio unlockables, like announcer packs and such.

Mortal Kombat 1 is weird because it might be a new beginning for a lot of the characters, but in terms of the story and mechanics it’s very much a continuation of what’s come before it. So far I’m really enjoying it, but it feels like the franchise is overdue for a more dramatic shift in gameplay.