Mortal Kombat 1 Review

Mortal Kombat; the iconic fighting game franchise has been around for over thirty years at this point and has been dominating the genre like no other fighting game ever has, and this year that statement still stands true. 

With the new release of Mortal Kombat 1, NetherRealm Studios decided to take a new route with this new entry in the series. At the end of Mortal Kombat 11, the entire timeline from the first Mortal Kombat in 1992 had been completely reset, with Mortal Kombat 1 being the first game to begin the new story. While the story does start off strong and intriguing, it is around 75% into the story that the story begins to go downhill and become too convoluted and bland. Despite this, it is still a good story overall and it would be one that should be recommended to both old and new Mortal Kombat fans.

The combat system in this game has been revamped as well. In previous installments of the series, the character roster would be rather large and filled with somewhere between 30-40 playable characters, while in this game there are only 22 base characters that can be played, yet there is a twist. The game introduced the new “Kameo” characters such as Sonya Blade and Jax who must be selected by the player as a secondary/backup character to help the player create new combos as well as defend themselves. While some enjoy the basic and more simple combat system, I prefer this system since the Kameo characters do not have to be used and the player can just focus on using the main character. Along with this, NetherRealm put much more effort into each of their main fighters as a good amount of the usual fighters were made into Kameos. The only issue is that some fan-favorite characters are not fully playable.

Another new addition to the game is the Invasions game mode, which is what I consider a mixture of Mario and Mortal Kombat, which seems to be an odd combination, but once you start to play, it becomes very enjoyable. It follows a very simple storyline with several different types of game modes and levels that the player has to traverse through. The levels get harder the further you go, but the player gets to level up different skills in all of their characters in order to keep up. The game mode was very polarizing among the fans as some found it extremely repetitive, while others found it more fun than the actual campaign itself. Personally, I found myself enjoying the game mode and I ended up beating the entire story.

While it’s not the perfect Mortal Kombat game, it still is one of my personal favorites in the series and it is one that I’d recommend to any player looking to get into fighting games.