This review contains spoilers
This game is... An extremely mixed bag.
I love the gameplay. Just to preface. There's an extremely fluid sense of combo structure, and each character feels extremely fleshed out. Variations add a lot to movesets, and guest characters especially feel true to life.
With that said. If you're a pro player looking for tournament matches, you'll LOVE this game.
If you're a casual player, you'll probably get a kick out of the camp in this game.
If you're a longtime Mortal Kombat fan like me... There's a lot you REALLY won't like about this game.
The story is no Mortal Kombat 9. The new characters, primarily the (ugh) Kombat Kids feel extremely lacking in the department of 'cool' we've been accustomed to. I think even a lot of the casual players feel this. I don't think I've ever seen a single fan of Jacqui Briggs or Kung Jin. And yet, I see people with profile pictures of Hsu Hao and Drahmin in the community on a weekly basis.
The Kombat Kids, for the most part, are extremely uninspired. Cassie is literally just Johnny, but a teenage girl. Jacqui is literally just Jax, but a teenage girl. One of my biggest pet peeves in fighting games is when designers clearly run out of ideas, so they make a character that clearly just apes from an existing character. Rock Howard, this is not.
Their writing, as well as the writing of a lot of veteran characters is... Actually just really bad, and at times it's really, REALLY bad. If you like Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade, prepare to watch them get totally assassinated. Instead of a confident movie star and a fierce special forces fighter, we instead get Deadbeat Dad and Strong Indypendent Oil War Whamen going at it in the marriage counselor's office.
The story beats themselves are incredibly rushed at times. The entire last act feels like it was rewritten at the last minute and had half the act cut out just to wank the Kombat Kids. Cassie Cage beating Corrupted Shinnok, seriously? It's a teenage girl effortlessly beating a corrupted chaos Elder God. Fuck it, let's just have Stryker shoot Onaga in the face next game lol.
A lot of the drama surrounding the game is about the Kombat Kids learning to fight and getting into teen drama. Was any of this REALLY necessary when it's obvious the entire last act was rushed? And I don't just say it was rushed for no reason, there's characters with movesets you can fight in the story mode that aren't even playable lol. Hell, one of them (Tanya) was DLC just a few months after the game released. Something weird was going on behind the scenes here, I'm not gonna go on a limb and say "SWEET BABY INC CALIFORNIA GOTTEM" or something, but I suspect a lot of the writing was either outsourced, meddled, or, the most likely option, rushed. I realize that Mortal Kombat has never really been known for having a tight knit story, but it was never outright lame.
Now, we've established the Kombat Kids are terrible. But the villains... They're pretty good! Kotal Khan and Erron Black have very slick designs and dialogue, D'Vorah is one of the most loathable villains in the whole series, and Ferra/Torr is actually, in my opinion, one of the better and more unique new characters to come in one of these games. An Aztec royal, a bounty hunter, an insectoid, and a symbiotic species make for some genuinely captivating characters. There's a very bizarre discrepancy of characters NetherRealm REALLY gave a shit about, and characters they really didn't.
The art direction... Ugh. Don't like it at all. The move from a more animated style to realism and constant murky grays and browns did this game no favors. Levels that should look fun and colorful just don't, and a lot of the characters look flat out ugly from it.
I won't go too much into the discourse about censorship for these games, but this was also the first that started the really hypocritical idea that the old titles were problematic in how the women were depicted. Because making everything gray and having iconic characters go through divorce is more gripping than letting them show around 30% of their skin while whooping ass, right? As well, I guess watching fathers mutilate their daughters is less problematic... Lol.
Don't get it twisted here though. While this game started a lot of issues I have with the series, it definitely has its strong points. The Krypt has a ton of content, and the towers make it very replayable. Different modifiers can activate for each tower, leading to some great shenanigans. There's even a Kustom Kombat mode where you can freely mix modifiers together in singles matches. Though, you can't play the Living Towers offline, and you can't fight CPUs in Kustom Kombat, so the enjoyment of these modes is a little limited even if the execution is great.
There's a lot of unlockables, including skins, concept art, and the brutality system. The brutalities are GREAT, fantastic even, adding tons of new ways to finish every match by fulfilling requirements and hitting specific inputs to finish an opponent in a fun, flashy way.
Overall, the real strengths of this game lie directly in the gameplay. If you turn your brain off, you'll probably have a lot of fun. It's a mixed bag, as I said, but I do lean towards it being good.
I love the gameplay. Just to preface. There's an extremely fluid sense of combo structure, and each character feels extremely fleshed out. Variations add a lot to movesets, and guest characters especially feel true to life.
With that said. If you're a pro player looking for tournament matches, you'll LOVE this game.
If you're a casual player, you'll probably get a kick out of the camp in this game.
If you're a longtime Mortal Kombat fan like me... There's a lot you REALLY won't like about this game.
The story is no Mortal Kombat 9. The new characters, primarily the (ugh) Kombat Kids feel extremely lacking in the department of 'cool' we've been accustomed to. I think even a lot of the casual players feel this. I don't think I've ever seen a single fan of Jacqui Briggs or Kung Jin. And yet, I see people with profile pictures of Hsu Hao and Drahmin in the community on a weekly basis.
The Kombat Kids, for the most part, are extremely uninspired. Cassie is literally just Johnny, but a teenage girl. Jacqui is literally just Jax, but a teenage girl. One of my biggest pet peeves in fighting games is when designers clearly run out of ideas, so they make a character that clearly just apes from an existing character. Rock Howard, this is not.
Their writing, as well as the writing of a lot of veteran characters is... Actually just really bad, and at times it's really, REALLY bad. If you like Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade, prepare to watch them get totally assassinated. Instead of a confident movie star and a fierce special forces fighter, we instead get Deadbeat Dad and Strong Indypendent Oil War Whamen going at it in the marriage counselor's office.
The story beats themselves are incredibly rushed at times. The entire last act feels like it was rewritten at the last minute and had half the act cut out just to wank the Kombat Kids. Cassie Cage beating Corrupted Shinnok, seriously? It's a teenage girl effortlessly beating a corrupted chaos Elder God. Fuck it, let's just have Stryker shoot Onaga in the face next game lol.
A lot of the drama surrounding the game is about the Kombat Kids learning to fight and getting into teen drama. Was any of this REALLY necessary when it's obvious the entire last act was rushed? And I don't just say it was rushed for no reason, there's characters with movesets you can fight in the story mode that aren't even playable lol. Hell, one of them (Tanya) was DLC just a few months after the game released. Something weird was going on behind the scenes here, I'm not gonna go on a limb and say "SWEET BABY INC CALIFORNIA GOTTEM" or something, but I suspect a lot of the writing was either outsourced, meddled, or, the most likely option, rushed. I realize that Mortal Kombat has never really been known for having a tight knit story, but it was never outright lame.
Now, we've established the Kombat Kids are terrible. But the villains... They're pretty good! Kotal Khan and Erron Black have very slick designs and dialogue, D'Vorah is one of the most loathable villains in the whole series, and Ferra/Torr is actually, in my opinion, one of the better and more unique new characters to come in one of these games. An Aztec royal, a bounty hunter, an insectoid, and a symbiotic species make for some genuinely captivating characters. There's a very bizarre discrepancy of characters NetherRealm REALLY gave a shit about, and characters they really didn't.
The art direction... Ugh. Don't like it at all. The move from a more animated style to realism and constant murky grays and browns did this game no favors. Levels that should look fun and colorful just don't, and a lot of the characters look flat out ugly from it.
I won't go too much into the discourse about censorship for these games, but this was also the first that started the really hypocritical idea that the old titles were problematic in how the women were depicted. Because making everything gray and having iconic characters go through divorce is more gripping than letting them show around 30% of their skin while whooping ass, right? As well, I guess watching fathers mutilate their daughters is less problematic... Lol.
Don't get it twisted here though. While this game started a lot of issues I have with the series, it definitely has its strong points. The Krypt has a ton of content, and the towers make it very replayable. Different modifiers can activate for each tower, leading to some great shenanigans. There's even a Kustom Kombat mode where you can freely mix modifiers together in singles matches. Though, you can't play the Living Towers offline, and you can't fight CPUs in Kustom Kombat, so the enjoyment of these modes is a little limited even if the execution is great.
There's a lot of unlockables, including skins, concept art, and the brutality system. The brutalities are GREAT, fantastic even, adding tons of new ways to finish every match by fulfilling requirements and hitting specific inputs to finish an opponent in a fun, flashy way.
Overall, the real strengths of this game lie directly in the gameplay. If you turn your brain off, you'll probably have a lot of fun. It's a mixed bag, as I said, but I do lean towards it being good.