MORTAL KOMBAT!!!! You know you just said that in the voice. Anyway, I've always been a Street Fighter guy. Mortal Kombat was cool for some initial shock value, but the gameplay of Street Fighter II was simply light years ahead of Mortal Kombat, and as they were generally in the arcades around the same time, I usually pumped my tokens into SF II. But I did always think that Mortal Kombat had a great look, and a great concept, and that if they simply cleaned up the enemy AI a bit, and advanced in their fighting mechanics at least to the level of SF II, they'd have themselves a good original game. Mortal Kombat II was MUCH better than the first game, but then Mortal Kombat 3 was dreadful, and I never really went back to the series.
But my friends had gotten Mortal Kombat X for Xbox One, and told me how great it was, so I picked it up. It was cheap, I'd heard good things from other sources, and they wanted to play online, so I went for it. So how is it?
It's no Street Fighter V. Which in itself is no Street Fighter III. But it's a solid, enjoyable fighter that doesn't take itself too seriously.
The basic mechanics of Mortal Kombat are all here. including a few newer system innovations from other fighters that help to pick up the otherwise boring playstyle a bit. Again, this is my first MK game I've played seriously at all since 3, so these innovations might have been picked up in some previous iterations of MK, all I know is that this is the first that I've seen them, so I'm treating them as new.
The fighters now include a now standard power meter that builds up by taking attacks and delivering them. You can use this meter to perform powered up versions of special attacks, or save it for the end to deliver an "x-ray" attack, which is basically a fatality in the middle of the match that usually deals about 33% of the enemy's life bar. Meter bonuses, as is typical in the genre, are given for certain things include counter attacks and first hit bonuses. While I found the powered up specials fairly underwhelming, particularly compared to their counterparts in SF III, IV, and V, it was a nice change that added flexibility to the characters, and the x-ray attacks are a nice touch of the brutal nature of MK added in as gameplay, rather than a post-match sign of disrespect.
You can also dash forward and backward now, a nice change that increases the mobility of your characters.
There is an excellent story mode that really puts Street Fighter V's dull one to shame. And it's WAY better than Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator's abomination of a story mode that basically has you watch an hour and a half long anime movie. Ugh. Seriously, there's not a single fight in the story mode. The mode is fully animated, features pretty good voice acting, and nicely walks the line that Mortal Kombat usually does by not taking itself too seriously. There are plenty of cheesy moments in it, but they're never really played up as serious ones, which is nice. What's better is that the story mode puts you in the role of a wide variety of fighters, and has you fight around 4 matches with each, while you're introduced to the story and the Mortal Kombat universe. This is an excellent opportunity to try out some of the new characters, as well as experience the new spins they have put on old characters.
One method in which they change up the old characters is by giving each character three basic loadouts (can't remember exactly what they're called at the moment) that change different elements of the character. So Liu Kang can go full offensive and use a loadout that lets him add fire to his punches, or he can use another loadout to gain the opportunity to heal himself by switching stances. This allows you to pick not only your character you want, but also nudge them more towards your preferred playstyle.
The game controls fairly nicely, although it sometimes is too forgiving on inputs, defaulting towards performing a special move too easily. For example, while crouching and trying for an uppercut, you can accidentally perform a down+left+y button press that will result in a special move, when that wasn't your intent. While Street Fighter V went a good deal towards improving the noob friendly nature of the inputs and combo system, this takes it to an absurd end.
It also feels like the competitive balance between characters is not great. There is a clear upper tier of characters, and a clear lower tier, and it feels like a huge gap between. This gap is far more than other competitive fighters, and results in frustrating experiences if you happen to like weaker characters, and a resulting lack of diversity in selected characters. To qualify this, I'll say that I know very little about competitive Mortal Kombat, so this is just based on my seat of the pants sense following a few weeks of play, rather than my more robust understanding of competitive Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, or Super Smash Bros.
The biggest downside of MK XL is the online experience, which has been pretty awful. This may be an Xbox Live thing, or a MK XL thing, but regardless, my experience was very negative. The matchmaking was extremely bad. I came into playing online following completing the tutorial and story mode, and without playing a Mortal Kombat game in years, and completely dominated. I understand that there's a beginning period in which you're getting matched, but it should have ramped up much quicker. I won my first ten matches in a row without losing a single round. I faced people that clearly knew 0 about fighting games, leaping into crouching uppercuts over and over, unleashing moves that left them highly vulnerable, not blocking, etc. It's fine that there exist people like this online, but after 5 matches, you would have thought they would have bumped me up a tier. I'm sure that given enough time, this problem would work itself out, but playing online quickly became stale without serious competition.
The worst part of the MK XL experience was, however, the actual online game experience, which is fraught with lag in just about every match I played. We aren't talking about split seconds of lag, however. We're talking about full seconds in which everything on screen would completely stop. It was the worst competitive fighting game experience online I've ever had. Even the experience of playing Street Fighter x Tekken and Ultra Street Fighter IV online on my PS3 was far superior to this. And the experience of SF V and Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator absolutely leave my experience with MK XL in the dust.
So I'd say that MK XL lays the ground work for a seriously enjoyable MK experience next go around. I think the controls need a bit of rework, and the online experience needs a complete overhaul. But it's a great improvement in gameplay for a franchise that has long thrived on style over substance, and doesn't do anything to change it's delightfully gory signature look and feel.
I'll give it a kool 7.5/10.
And that's it! I'm finally done with my gaming backlog! Hopefully I'll beat Mega Man 10 tonight or later this week, bringing the classic Mega Man chapter of this year to a close. The next game I'll play after Mega Man 10 is teased in the image below...
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