[PC Games] MORTAL KOMBAT 1 REVIEW

[-CosmiNNe]

Few long-running series have reinvented themselves for the modern era as successfully as Mortal Kombat. Since the 2011 reboot found a fresh yet familiar formula for its brawls, and finally made some sense of its sprawling lore, each new entry has had its own distinct and exciting identity, from X's explosion of new characters to 11's clash of past and present. So the question is, what's Mortal Kombat 1's new take on the series? The unfortunate answer is, though it's still a solid fighter, it doesn't really have one. 

NetherRealm has pitched this as another soft reboot for the series—a fresh entry point that sheds much of the confusing backstory and welcomes in new players. But that's not really what we've got. Instead, Mortal Kombat 1 feels more entrenched in the series' past than ever, struggling to iterate on its core systems or to tell an accessible new story. It's a fun fighting game at its core, but it's definitely the weakest of the recent MKs, and it's disappointingly lacking in the series' true greatest asset: personality. 

For many, the eight-hour cinematic story campaign will be the main draw, especially following on from the universe-shattering events of the end of Mortal Kombat 11. The long and short is, hero-turned-god Liu Kang has rebooted time to create a more peaceful and chummy version of the setting, with many of the classic villains carefully neutered or redeemed by their new circumstances. As you might expect from a series known for its gory executions, that peace is fated not to last, largely thanks to the meddling of a mysterious villain who seems to want to correct the path of history back towards violence and chaos.

The first half is promising, seeming to strip things back to a simpler kind of Mortal Kombat story—one more grounded in martial arts movies than grand, multiverse-spanning fantasy. Familiar characters are reimagined in interesting ways—Raiden is now a plucky mortal champion, Mileena is a noble heir tortured by a dark secret, and Sub-Zero and Scorpion are brothers in the same clan. Fans of long-standing jobbers Baraka and Reptile, who traditionally exist just to get beaten into pulp while the heroes wait for some real villains to come along, will be thrilled to hear they both finally get their due, getting to be endearing anti-heroes this time around. 

But this new set-up barely gets the chance to find its feet before we're back into mind-bending nonsense, and the story gets bogged down in reheated ideas, twists that rely on you knowing what happened not only in MK11 but in its DLC expansion too, and bizarre tributes to the early-2000s era games. As a long-time fan, I couldn't help but feel it's all been done much better before; for a newcomer, I suspect it would all be impenetrable. 

 

 

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/mortal-kombat-1-review/