What's new this time? Besides an updated roster of fighters-er, excuse us, Kombatants-players now have an important decision to make before every fight. You can spend a third of a fully charged meter to augment a "special" attack-make that fireball bigger, or add a few blows to that intense kick flurry-or you can wait until the meter is totally full to trigger an "X-Ray" attack that knocks off a full third of your foe's energy. The biggest change over the years, which remains in this go-round, is a "special" meter that fills up through the course of a fight.
Thankfully, the stuff that matters-the punching, the combos, the speed, and the game’s guts, both figurative and literal-glistens like a bloody torso freshly ripped from its owner’s legs. In many ways, Mortal Kombat X fails miserably with that ambition, as NetherRealm has draped the proceedings with all kinds of mixed pomp and underwhelming circumstance.
Hell, it tried that in 2009 with a DC Comics mash-up game, and those no-fatality results proved disastrous.Īs such, the gore and dismemberment aren’t going anywhere, but as the tenth official game makes clear, neither is the game’s insistence that we'd better appreciate the bloody gravitas of its fisticuffs. Perhaps that’s due to the incredibly violent chip this game carries on its shoulder-one in the shape of a spine yanked out of a masked ninja’s back, at that-which forms a legacy it will certainly never escape. That’s never been more apparent than in Mortal Kombat X. With every sequel, the game’s designers-once employed at Midway, now working at NetherRealm Studios-have amped up the series’ technology, plot, and demeanor, desperate to be taken seriously. Mortal Kombat will turn 23 years old later this year, but from the look of its latest iteration, the fighting game franchise still carries the raging insecurities of a teenager.
Platform: Xbox One (reviewed), PS4, PC (Xbox 360 and PS3 coming in June) Game Details Developer: NetherRealm Studios
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