Mortal Kombat 1 Review (Tr3m0r)
I have been a mortal kombat fanatic ever since it's release in the arcades in the early 1990s. While it never was a super competitive game like the street fighter, virtua fighter and tekken franchises, it was known for fun combat, brutal fatalities and awesome sound and digitized graphics. It was a highly controversial game that really pushed the boundaries of the time.
Sadly the game has lost all sense of boundary pushing qualities and passion to be an industry leader in favor of highly corporate monetization practices and concern over their ESG ratings. One of the most progressive games of all time has become a very sterile and flaccid game that is regressive. The fatalities are so toned down and "One size fits all" likely to comport to the Switch without having to do any work. The gore is gone in favor of highly stylized takes. An example is Johnny Cage's default fatality where he tears the face off the opponent on a Hollywood Walk of Fame cement stone. The tearing of the face and the look of the brain couldn't be more PG and corny than it is.
The game seems to have gone through zero quality testing on the PC. It runs absolutely terribly on a wide range of systems with only an acknowledgement at the time of this writing that they are working on fixing it. They want the user to lower their refresh rate to 60hz as a temporary fix. In 2023, the PC (or even consoles) shouldn't need to have fatalities, story mode, X-ray combat and Invasion mode run with 30FPS. It's terribly immersion breaking. The graphics don't look better than the previous MK in my opinion.
The loss of the krypt took a lot of exploration fun out of the game. There is absolutely NOTHING innovative or fun about invasion mode and is yet again another example of out of touch developers who don't like or play their products implementing a soulless mode that is literally a point and click mode. It's not fun at all.
The game play looks to be pretty solid and well executed along with the cameo system and it seems like the game is embraced by the competitive community so I am sure that will help this game over the long run. I would recommend users to purchase the game on the consoles as it is reported to run flawlessly and will have much better support and players. The game has already been patched on console with nothing on the highly troubled PC port. I will get my monies worth out of the game but I really thought there would be some extra tic boxes for PC players with graphical fidelity, performance and cross play. It remains to be seen if they implement cross play or any special options for the PC graphically. MK 11 for reference had "soft shadows" and did look better than the console version.
Overall, I wouldn't purchase the gamee in this state and it's literally almost unplayable. Wait for a "Mortal Discount"
Only thing more cringe inducing than this game is watching Ed Boon try to attempt eating Hot Wings while feinting enthusiasm for this cash grab product. The spicey wing challenge was a better Fatality on Boon than 90% included in this game.