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Raiden’s interference with the timeline in Mortal Kombat (2011) bore impressive results. NetherRealm Studios’ fresh take on the timeline yielded fascinating changes that manifested in Mortal Kombat X. After that game’s bombshell ending everyone was left wondering, “what’s next?” Four years later, we finally have what’s next, Mortal Kombat 11. With a time-bending new antagonist and a convergence of characters from the past and present, Mortal Kombat 11 looks to expand the series lore, combat and competitive capabilities dramatically. Does Mortal Kombat 11 execute a flawless victory or is this an entry that should perform a hara-kiri? Mortal Kombat 11 picks up shortly after the events of Mortal Kombat X. Shinnok is captured, Raiden is corrupted, and Liu Kang and Kitana rule the NetherRealm. Raiden’s actions earn the ire of Kronika, the keeper of time, who sees his alterations to the timeline as blasphemy against her creations. Intending to create a new era without Raiden, Kronika summons villains from the present and past to help her make her vision a reality. It’s up to a Raiden from the past and his ragtag team of heroes to stop Kronika from permanently altering the course of the Mortal Kombat universe. NetherRealm Studios has slowly been perfecting their storytelling chops over the years, and Mortal Kombat 11 is no doubt the best written and presented story yet. The game’s writing delivers comedy, emotion and even heartbreak. Some of the best chapters pair two characters up and allow for meaningful interactions. The writing is spot on in Mortal Kombat 11 and seeing past and present incarnations of characters interact with one another never tires. Mortal Kombat 11 also manages to deliver quite a few surprises and plot twists. While Mortal Kombat and X followed the outlines of Mortal Kombat 1-4, 11 features a wholly original story not bound to any previous title. It feels entirely fresh, though it is comforting when a familiar character or location shows up. The game’s story is told on a grander scale than any previous NetherRealm Studios project. Epic, cinematic cutscenes are splattered throughout the campaign, including an ending battle scene that’s sure to excite longtime fans. NetherRealm Studios couldn’t quite stick the landing with the ending, however, which feels rushed and unexciting. Worst, the campaign’s conclusion almost feels like an insult to longtime fans of the lore. It’s a disappointing ending to an otherwise wonderful tale. Those familiar with previous NetherRealm Studios campaigns will feel right at home completing Mortal Kombat 11’s. The story is split into twelve chapters with four fights per chapter and plenty of cutscenes. In total, it’ll take you anywhere between four and five hours to complete the campaign depending on difficulty. A fighting game isn’t any good without solid combat mechanics, which Mortal Kombat has always succeeded at providing. Mortal Kombat 11 offers a familiar system for previous titles, but with changes that ultimately elevate the experience. Players execute combos by combining a series of punches (assigned to the top two buttons) and kicks (the bottom two buttons). Meanwhile, inputting the right directional buttons alongside a face button executes special attacks. Mortal Kombat veterans will feel right at home with Mortal Kombat 11. What veterans will notice is the absence of the Energy Meter. In Mortal Kombat 11, that meter is broken into two meters, attack and defense. The defense meter allows for special dodges, combo cancellers, and rolls. The attack meter enables players to enhance special moves. Each meter only has two uses, and though they gradually fill up over time, players will need to be careful with how and when they use them. Also gone are X-Ray moves. Instead, Mortal Kombat 11 introduces Fatal Blows, a powerful move similar to X-Rays, but can only be used when you’re health drops below 30%. These last chance moves can only be used once per turn, meaning you’ll need to be strategic with how you use them. Once the credits roll, players will find a bevy of additional content. Longtime fans can hop straight into the Klassic Towers to climb ladders, master characters and earn endings. The game launches with a total of 24 playable characters. A 25th, Shao Kahn, is unfortunately gated off as a pre-order bonus with no option to unlock him via playing. Overall, Mortal Kombat 11’s roster is good, though predictable. Most characters make a return from Mortal Kombat X (Raiden, Liu Kang, Erron Black, etc.) with a handful of classic favorites who missed out on the last game returning (Noob Saibot, Baraka, Jade, etc.). Only three characters are brand new (Geras, Kollector and Cetrion) and just a single character from the 3D era returns. It’s a fine roster, but it would have been nice to give other characters a chance in the spotlight. What is nice is the deep customization system available per character. Variations return from Mortal Kombat X, but not in the same way. Here, players combine different pieces of gear, abilities and cosmetics to tailor each character to your playstyle. Want a Dark Raiden who creates a protective aura of thunder around him? You can make that. How about a Light Raiden who can teleport and use his staff as a lightning rod? Yes, you can make that too. There are also additional brutalities, fatalities, poses, intros and other goodies for players to equip, but they come at a cost. Returning from previous games is the Krypt, which has gradually grown more complex with each entry. Mortal Kombat 11 takes it too far by turning the Krypt into a third-person adventure game. It’s a complex maze of puzzles, key items and unlockables that quickly becomes a tiresome time sink. Most egregious, however, is that Mortal Kombat 11 and the Krypt has not one currency, but four. There are traditional Koins, but on top of that, there’s souls and hearts, which are required to unlock special chests and are acquired at a much slower rate than Koins. Finally, there are Time Crystals, the game’s premium currency. At this point, we’re not quite sure what Time Crystals will buy, but it’s easy to imagine they can skip much of the game’s grind in the Krypt. The Krypt is necessary as it not only unlocks skins, fatalities, brutalities and emotes, but also Konsumables for Towers of Time. Towers of Time is the evolution of Injustice 2’s Multiverse. A collection of different towers with various modifiers and objectives, Towers of Time represents the best way to earn new gear and shaders and participate in some zany matches. The mode, however, is tainted by Konsumables. Unless you use a Konsumable, you get no modifiers to help you. Instead, all the active modifiers are aimed squarely at helping your opponent and hurting you. For example, a modifier that would drop bombs on the field in Mortal Kombat X would damage both enemies if they were in the vicinity. In Mortal Kombat 11, those bombs only hurt you unless you use a Konsumable to get your own modifier. You’ll need those modifiers too, because it feels like the game actively cheats in Towers of Time. Double battles, player damage nerfs, enemy damage increases, heat-seeking missiles and effects over time are just some of the many things the game throws at you. Unlike the Multiverse, the Towers of Time aren’t fair. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the Krypt and Towers of Time are mere means to introduce additional microtransactions. Towers of Time consistently punishes players with difficult modifiers and encourages them to use Konsumables. Meanwhile, the Krypt provides far too many chests that require one of three different currencies. Then there’s the the premium time crystals, which feel like too much for a game that already has too many currencies. Finally, there’s the return of Easy Fatality and Skip Fight tokens. Unfortunately, it actively feels like the Krypt and Towers of Time were designed with monetization in mind. Mortal Kombat X’s suite of online features returns in Mortal Kombat 11. Players can participate in Kasual, ranked and King-of-the-Hill style matches. There’s also the opportunity to create custom matches with your own rules and modifiers. Thankfully, the online experience holds up much better than X at launch. The matches ran smoothly with only a few hiccups here and there. Matchmaking was quick with the system performing a solid job at matching similar-leveled players. It’s a vastly superior online experience than what we got four years ago. At Mortal Kombat 11’s reveal, there was some confusion about whether the game was running on Unreal 4 or a modified Unreal 3. It turned out it wasn’t Unreal 4, but you wouldn’t have guessed it based on the visuals. Mortal Kombat 11 is a massive step-up from Mortal Kombat X and Injustice 2. Character models and textures are well detailed both in cutscenes and during fights. Combat is visceral, bloody and so violently detailed that it’s hard not to gasp the first time a rib cage breaks or teeth shatter. There’s also lovely environmental detail in the game’s stages, including leaves rustling in the wind, sand blowing across the screen and a hive bristling with angry insects. The most improved thing about the presentation, however, are the animations. NetherRealm Studios have earned a reputation for lifeless animations. That’s a reputation they’ve shredded with Mortal Kombat 11. Characters animate beautifully when in combat, and you now feel every hit. There are still instances of wayward animations here and there, but overall the game is beautifully animated. One point of concern is consistency. The Mortal Kombat franchise is known for altering character designs and voice actors, but Mortal Kombat 11 goes too far with too many characters. Jax, Cassie Cage, Jacqui Briggs, Liu Kang, Scorpion and Baraka are just a handful of the characters who have gone through radical visual and audio changes since Mortal Kombat X. The Mortal Kombat universe needs consistent looking and sounding characters, but Mortal Kombat 11 kind of throws that idea out the window. Mortal Kombat 11 is a beautiful game to look at and play. It’s as much a joy watching characters fight as it is witnessing the ever-gory fatalities. It would have just helped if there was a bit more consistency in the continuity.

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Mobile apps are a difficult business to succeed in. The competition in mobile gaming is even tougher. Where can you grow your game? Where can you even just be competitive? If you look toward emerging markets and nail it, the payoff is huge, as these regions often have massive growth potential. But these markets do present their own unique challenges. While putting together 2018’s worldwide download leaders, I easily saw the rise of emerging markets through apps that had not been on the list in the past. Then again, while working on my most recent piece for VentureBeat, looking at the top mobile games by active users, I noticed the No. 3 game on the list (Free Fire) had a significant portion of its player base in Brazil. This is what got me thinking about the challenges of making a successful mobile game in less developed/emerging markets, and so I reached out to Garena, the maker of Free Fire, to ask them how they do it. I was put in touch with Producer Harold Teo, and he told me that the South American market was among the team’s areas of focus from the get-go. Let’s start with some basics: Free Fire boasts more than 350 million registered players and more than 100 million of those were counted as active in Q4 2018. The game accounted for 44.5 percent of the $231.4 million in adjusted revenue Garena recorded in the fourth quarter. The company couldn’t tell me which market brings in the most revenue for Free Fire, but Apptopia’s app intelligence indicates Brazil generated 29 percent of the game’s fourth quarter revenue, the most of any market. Keep in mind that Apptopia does not track Android revenue outside of Google Play. Diving deeper, and based data from GameRefinery, the biggest differentiator between Free Fire and PUBG Mobile in terms of features is the use of characters with specific skills. Players buy/earn characters and develop them by earning fragments. Even though skills don’t have a significant effect on gameplay, it adds a nice additional layer for players to think about and variety to monetization on top of cosmetics. Free Fire was one of the first battle royale games to hit the mobile market in late 2017, along with three games from NetEase (Survivor Royale, Knives Out, Rules of Survival). Garena soft-launched Free Fire in selected markets across Southeast Asia, a region the studio’s familiar with, before going worldwide just two-and-a-half months later. Based on player feedback and retention data, Harold Teo and his team felt the game was ready to be on the worldwide stage. “Being one of the first to market and with a focus on mobile has been beneficial to us [as it pertains to competition],” says Teo. “All of our designs and product features are made specifically for mobile users, so we didn’t have to translate anything.” Unlike Fortnite and PUBG’s PC and console versions, Free Fire was made solely for mobile and is unavailable to play on other platforms. But Teo believes the strong focus on mobile is paying off, especially when it comes to emerging markets. Garena strategically designed the game to be lightweight in terms of disk space required from players. It launched at 200MB and now sits at around 400MB. This was done in order to maximize its user base. Teo says Free Fire will run smoothly on almost any device, which was also done on purpose. For a size comparison, Fortnite and PUBG Mobile both easily require more than a gigabyte of disk space. Fortnite and other battle royale games also have specific hardware requirements on mobile for the games to run smoothly. This locks out a number of potential players, mostly in emerging markets. “Lightweight games are social,” explains Teo. “People want to play with their friends and so you play the game everyone can play. In many cases, that’s Free Fire.” Top end phones have not permeated the Brazilian market like they have in China or the United States. It’s sort of like a snowball effect for users. Even if you have a great phone, playing with your friends is a much more attractive option. I wanted to understand what else goes into having success in these less developed markets, where players are often not as comfortable making purchases online, or are simply unbanked. Teo tells me this is all tackled through intense localization efforts. Judging by his voice on the phone, this is clearly an area he is passionate about, or at least believes very strongly in. He goes on to say “The biggest challenge for us in these markets is getting to know what the gamers really want. Not all markets have the same needs. Every single country has their own culture, language, etc. We really have to get on the ground and get our hands dirty to know what each country needs and build what each country wants” This isn’t lip service either. In each market for Free Fire, there is a local operation team. They are in touch with the local community of gamers, where they conduct focus group studies and surveys on a regular basis. “We have one or two of these focus groups every month and each one is targeted at a specific thing. It helps is design future products and features. Players love seeing that they are being heard and getting the things they want.” Through specially tailored in-game events, bonuses and in-game aesthetics, the Free Fire team tries to embrace the local cultures, especially surrounding real world events like Carnival in Brazil or Songkran in Thailand. It’s a nice change of pace and recognition of the excitement surrounding their local community. Monetization is also market specific. While most gamers in the United States are already well accustomed to making purchases online, that is not always the case in other markets, particularly in South America. To address this, Teo’s team identifies pricing and payment strategies that give them the most access to their targeted user bases in each market, and gets to work on integration. So, what’s next for Teo’s Free Fire team? He tells me esports are going to be a big focus for them in the coming months. In April, Garena is holding the Free Fire World Cup in Bangkok. The tournament will start with about 15,000 local teams and the top 12 will be flown into Bangkok to compete to be the inaugural Free Fire World Champion. The key takeaway here is if you’re looking for growth, you need to get ahead of the curve and lay the groundwork now. Emerging markets are just that — emerging. This means there is massive growth potential moving forward if you properly educate your team on the market’s current status in mobile, and what the communities both need and desire. South American markets like Brazil and Asian markets like India are embracing mobile apps and definitely mobile games.

The Battle Royale craze started back in 2017, when games like PUBG and Fortnite quickly stormed the traditional video gaming industry and offered players a unique gameplay experience in a Hunger Games fashion. For the last two years, Battle Royale titles created more hype than any triple-A release and a number of publishers' started to explore options on how to profit from it. The unexpected release of Apex Legends from Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: EA) at the beginning of February shows that there is still a great demand for this type of game, as its number of users grows at a greater rate in comparison to Fortnite and it's one of the most watched games on Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) platform Twitch. Considering the poor performance of Electronic Arts in the previous calendar year, Apex Legends gives investors a greater hope for the publisher's future and I believe that the game itself will be the company's major catalyst of growth in the upcoming quarters. Riding the Trend After Battlefront 2 controversy and failed Battlefield V launch, Electronic Arts was forced to change the way it conducts business in order to become more consumer friendly. When I was writing an article about the company in December, the only catalyst for growth at that time was the game called Anthem that was fully released last month. Unlike other major titles, Anthem didn't have a huge marketing campaign and the company was hoping to attract the winter crowd to play the game, as not a lot of titles are released during this period. However, the game itself is unfinished, as a lot of reviews point out the fact that Anthem has a lot of linear and repetitive missions that make the title too boring and that the developer under delivered on its promises. While, Anthem had weak launch, it was recently reported that the game has become the bestselling title in February in US. Going forward, EA will continue to support Anthem, as the recent roadmap shows that there will be a number of major content updates for the game in the foreseeable future. The only question is whether the publisher should continue to update the game, considering mixed reviews and a negative feedback. To answer that question, we should wait for the next conference call that is scheduled for May to find out whether Anthem has a long-term potential.

The PC continues to be one of the best platforms for video games, with a great library of titles across every imaginable genre. The biggest marketplace for buying these games remains Steam, and Valve’s store has amassed a collection of truly legendary games over the years. Whether you’re interested in the latest first-person shooter or an enormous role-playing game that never has to end, Steam has you covered, and we’ve compiled a list of its very best games. Separated by genre, these are the best games you can play on Steam. Sports and racing ‘ROCKET LEAGUE’ Typically, sports games star digitized athletes who run around a field and attempt to score points, but Psyonix took a different a different approach with Rocket League. The soccer-like game places players in control of small rocket-boosted cars that zip across the pitch and ram head-first into giant soccer balls. What looks like a simple game requires a tremendous amount of practice and control, and that depth has helped keep its dedicated player-base engaged for years. Fighting ‘DRAGON BALL FIGHTERZ’ Who would have thought that a Dragon Ball game released in 2018 would be one of 2018’s very best games? A tag-team fighter that uses an art style remarkably similar to the anime, Dragon Ball FighterZ is a blisteringly-fast game that still manages to be welcoming for newcomers – even those completely unfamiliar with the genre. Despite this, its depth has made it a favorite at esports events, and its large cast of characters means there are sure to be at least a few heroes you want to send into battle. It also has plenty of callbacks to famous Dragon Ball Z show moments that are sure to make fans very happy. Strategy ‘XCOM 2’ Firaxis revived the X-COM strategy series from the brink of death with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which combined tough-as-nails turn-based combat with a slick coat of classic sci-fi paint, and the sequel only makes things better. XCOM 2 is unquestionably harder than its predecessor, but it also provides you with far more options for tackling the alien occupiers who have taken over Earth. With every decision you make potentially having huge consequences, it’s not for the faint of heart, but those willing to take command will not be disappointed. Action ‘GRAND THEFT AUTO V’ Rockstar’s latest crime-causing social satire sold more than 100 million copies for a reason: Grand Theft Auto V is a magnificent open-world action game with enough content to keep players busy for years. Many have willingly done so, enjoying its single-player content as well as the always-evolving Grand Theft Auto Online. The Steam version wasn’t available when the game first launched, but user-created content and mods have helped to make it the definitive version of the game.