Mortal Kombat X Review

Mortal Kombat X Review

When this game fell on my lap I thought to myself how have Beat em’ up games evolved over the years, since my youth Street Fighter being the king of the franchise then Mortal Kombat came along with all the gore and fatalities to match Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise, Never Realm have brought a new angle to the beat em’ up games with factions in Mortal Kombat X.

You have the choice of five factions that will earn points globally after every fight whether it being offline or online, you have the choice from,

• Lin Kuei ‘Led by the grandmaster Sub-Zero’
• White Lotus ‘Founded by Raiden’
• Special Forces ‘Task force led by General Sonya Blade’
• Black Dragon ‘A cutthroat criminal organisation which is associated with Kano’
• Brotherhood of Shadow ‘ Hailing from the netherrealm, the brotherhood is a ruthless secretive organisation’

At first I thought I could only use fighters from their respectful factions so I choose carefully, but then it dawned on me that it was my gamertag that was part of the faction not the character I choose.

You can fight in only faction matches which has its own game mode this offers online towers to conquer, each with a life span of hours to days before it changes. The towers that are longer in time are a little less challenging however, during these towers you will have challenges to earn Koins to then purchase new combos and fatalities and character apparel. Some of the challenges may require certain condition like a 30% damage combo or perform five fatalities.

Mortal Kombat X also has a story mode explained below which pits players in story fights with set characters to use at that specific moment and the quick time events during cut scenes.

“Several years after the defeat of Shao Kahn, Shinnok attacks Earthrealm with his army of Netherrealm forces, including the Earthrealm warriors who were killed during Kahn’s invasion and are now resurrected as revenants under Quan Chi’s control. After fighting their fallen comrades, a strike team led by Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, and Kenshi open a portal to Raiden’s Sky Temple and head to the Jinsei Chamber, the source of Earthrealm’s life force, where Raiden and Fujin are battling Shinnok and his Netherrealm forces. During the fight near the Jinsei, they distract Shinnok long enough for Raiden to steal Shinnok’s amulet and imprison him inside it, but Quan Chi escapes.

This was an interesting experience, it reminded me of the game mode in the Injustice game where you followed the story and controlled the characters in their part of the story.

“Visually I can’t fault the game the gore is amazing,

the fatalities are so graphic it even made me look

away for a split second”

Of course you can still have a little battle with your pals for a bit of old school nostalgia but listen when i say it is completely different, you don’t have the environment interaction like Dead or Alive but you do have the option to use some of the environment to your advantage to get out of a sticky situation.

It is normally highlighted when you’re in the right position and then a press of the RB button and you either do some acrobatic move to avoid an attack or you interact with your opponent, there is one stage in Otherworld where you literally hit your opponent with an old lady that is nearby, and then you get an achievement for your troubles this did give me a little chuckle.

I found the game extremely hard to control, reason behind this is I have recently had the pleasure to play Street Fighter 2 on the old school arcade and felt right at home when playing it, however with the current next gen consoles the controller is not built for these kind of games, with the added change that moving backwards is no longer the block option I had to completely overhaul my approach to a fight, I also lost numerous times not knowing this, i’m a stubborn git when it comes to these games and the controls, so why change something that has been the same for years.

The Xbox controller is more curved than the PS4 one which makes it that little bit easier to button mash in my opinion, unless you want to spend £100+ on one of those arcade joysticks then this is going to be a challenge for gamers that prefer the arcade approach to the old school beat em’ ups.

Visually I can’t fault the game, the gore is amazing, the fatalities are so graphic it even made me look away for a split second, Goro yes the reptile with four arms has one where he smashes his opponent’s head down their neck, and then rips of their breast-plate to reveal their head in their stomach…catching stuff.

The backgrounds on the stages are animated brilliantly and are always moving as well, not like the old school random person moving here and there, these people are getting on with their everyday lives, kind of weird that they aren’t at all interested in these larger than life monsters hacking the hell out of each other if you ask me.

The sounds are accurate to my imagination I mean i’ve never heard someone get disemboweled before but I think it would sound like it does in Mortal Kombat X. There isn’t enough old school nostalgic moments for me to really enjoy the game if i’m honest, I used to love the random moments in the old games where you do a big uppercut and the ‘Whoopsie’ guy appeared in the corner, little things like that made the game, now it seems its one big story with a beat em’ up feel to it, this game would be so much better if it had an arcade mode to play like the old days.

One of the new features in the game is the X Ray moves you can pull off when you concede so much damage, it works like a turbo meter in the old Street Fighter games, once it is available to pull off yank the Triggers together and boom cue a sickening sequence where you begin to literally crack skulls and burst testicles I kid you not.

Mortal Kombat X has an online and offline game-mode called living towers as mentioned early on in the review the towers have set challenges which change depending on what tower you choose.

The Quick Tower is basically just a matter of climbing up the tower – kind of like the classic way that the old Mortal Kombat games were played. However, there’s a twist. The Quick Tower has various challenges for players to overcome while dealing with match conditions and is updated every few hours. What sort of match conditions? Well, like player slowdown or player speed-up based on the combos you execute.

More combos means you move faster. Additional conditions include things like falling bombs from the sky or extra bonus points for only doing something like taking out an opponent with just leg kicks or what have you. This is somewhat similar to the kind of hidden methods that were used for unlocking hidden characters in the older Mortal Kombat games. One of the challenges I had to conquer was fight the entire tower with worm holes popping up, trust me avoiding them was a tall task, these little things add a bit of fun to the game to be fair.

The Daily Tower mode offers players updated challenges to complete within a 24 hour period. The Daily Tower challenges would be reset after the 24 hour period, offering players eight new challenges to complete. The Premier Tower is updated on a weekly basis but that’s because it offers 15 challenges and has special events that players must overcome for special bonuses, within the Factions there is the opportunity to have online versus mode but the entirety of the online portion is covered with the factions.

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