When a new iteration of your favorite fighting game comes out, one should always go into it with reserved excitement. Unlike any other video game genre, the fighting game can divide its own community in a multitude of ways, sometimes over the most mundane of changes or additions. You don’t have to look farther than the Street Fighter series to see that. That fighting game series has essentially seen the same cast from Street Fighter 2 go at it for over twenty years now, and when they mix things up in Street Fighter 3 by bringing in an all new cast, well, fans were less than welcoming. Sure, that game is now legendary as objectively the best Street Fighter, but it’s also the game to see the least amount of revisions.
Mortal Kombat X is a good fighting game, but one that falls victim to its own self-imposed shortcomings. Getting the basics out-of-the-way, Mortal Kombat X takes place some twenty years after the last game and tries to finally break away from vintage Mortal Kombat by having an all original story, with the focus on a new main cast. After the events of Mortal Kombat 9, Shinnok has grown in power while Earthrealm was caught up battling Shao Khan. Now the former Elder God is free, thanks to Quan Chi, and seeks to destroy Raiden and Earthrealm along with him. While the story is all new this time around, it still relies heavily on past events or is inspired by them, most notably things that happened in Mortal Kombat 4.
This is a great way to get us introduced to the new Kast of Kombatants, –okay, no more with the K names for the rest of this review– but the game doesn’t really put the focus on them until some hours into the storyline. Sure, you do get to play as them from time to time, but classic characters still take center stage -It’s a good thing I love Johnny Cage. You’d figure that the entire reason for the twenty year gap is to distance themselves and allow new characters to emerge, but nothing really feels… New -At least not on the hero side of things. The story of Mortal Kombat X, and most of the marketing since last years E3, talked about these new combatants. Cassie Cage, the daughter of Sonya and Johnny, Jacqui Briggs, the daughter of Jax, and so on. The problem is that while all these kids look like new players, they are essentially just our old favorite in new skins.
Cassie plays like a combination of her parents, Jacqui is female Jax with silly skeletal gauntlets that simulate his powers because.. Reasons, and our other two heroes are pretty much boring clones of Kenshi and Scorpion. This becomes one of the real problems with Mortal Kombat X and most fighting games in general. Either give me all new people to build a new series/side series of games on, or just keep the old guard and sprinkle in some new faces every game. Don’t just give me a bunch of new kids that are pretty much copies of past combatants. Not only that, but Mortal Kombat X can’t even keep its own storyline straight. The game firmly established that it takes place twenty years from Mortal Kombat 9, but spends far too much time flashing back to all the years in between. Not only that, but it flashes to events that you already know the outcome of because of other characters flashbacks. And for a game about breaking bones and ripping out innards like it free candy on Halloween, nobody in the story ever gets the broght ideas to put a foot through someones head and fix everything.
It just comes off as if the development team wanted to break away and try something new with fresh faces, but halfway through the powers that be freaked out and demanded that they fill in all the gaps and toss around cameos for characters noboby cares about let alone remembers –I’m lookng at you Sareena. What’s the point in setting things in the future if you are going to spend the majority of the game flashing back to the past. I mean, you already did the same thing last game with Raiden having all his flashbacks to the previous games, but thankfully there you weren’t forced to play any of them. Maybe you don’t care about the story and think me too harsh for harping on it so much, but the story mode was one of the things that gave Mortal Kombat 9 real legs; real life to its gameplay. In Mortal Kombat X, for all its new characters, just feels like more of the same thing. While I sat and marathoned Mortal Kombat 9 on my own, then did it again the following weekend because I had to show it to friends, with Mortal Kombat X, I had to step away and take breaks and didn’t tell anyone that I bought it.
Look, the gameplay still is as good as ever with characters looking and playing great. There are a lot of moves and the new mechanics do add a little bit of fun. I like that if you go up against another Kano in multiplayer you might be fighting a Kano with a different style. as each character now has three each. It’s a neat feature to be sure, but I sort of feel it’s only there to fill up the game instead of bringing in more characters. If you played Mortal Kombat 9 nothing here is really going to surprise you. But that’s just the thing, Mortal Kombat X is just more of the same with a prettier presentation and stranger story. And while the Mortal Kombat fan will have a lot of fun with the game, your average gamer probably be thrilled with this outing. The plus thing about everything here is that the new bad guy characters that we get are pretty damn fantastic. I just spent most of the game wishing the focus were on them.
The biggest problem I have is that as with any fighting game, having a smooth experience is key to having a good time. I have a custom rig I built a little while back, and while it’s not going to win any awards or play the newest games on MEGA ULTRA LOOK AT ME settings, I’ve yet to have any game, including any of the Crysis series, give me any trouble on high. Mortal Kombat X on the other hand was a nightmare to get running adequately on my system. It was so bad that I had to download third-party drivers for my AMD card just to try to optimize the game -I had mixed results with that. When I did get things running okay the game would begin to slow-down after playing for an hour or so and was taking up a strangely high amount of system resources. Turns out people on the forums noted that the game was so poorly optimized that a memory leaking was the cause of mine, and most everyones problems.
You’ll notice that I didn’t cover the multiplayer aspect of Mortal Kombat X at all so far, and I won’t be doing much of it because the game is inherently broken on the PC. We have a PS4 and Xbox One here, but I was excited to try things out on the PC as that version was promoted as much as the others, and a fighter on the PC is still a rarity. I came in expecting good things, –Street Fighter 4 (insert whatever revision it’s up to now here) played great on Steam– but the Mortal Kombat X multiplayer is near unplayable, and wasn’t at all for many on launch. Multiplayer was down, frame-rate issues were abundant, and there was even, and still is, a petition on the games Steam community page demanding refunds from… Anyone.
I’m not sure how you screw something like this up? The game was created on a PC –Lot’s of them I’m sure– and yet we got a piss poor port of the console game with little to no support. So, while I don’t do the whole multiplayer thing often, this is the kind of game I would have loved to try it with. Mortal Kombat 9 was, and is, probably the most fun I’ve had playing online thanks in part to its two-on-two game mode. I would sit for hours with my roommate and just get our asses handed to us. We went so far as to sharpie the move list for our mains on the coffee table in the game room. I’m almost positive we were the only team to main Reptile and Striker. This time around though, I have yet to have any fun online, even after waiting nearly a week after the game’s launch before writing this review hoping they’d have things fixed.
If you are a Mortal Kombat fan then I do recommend this game to you under the condition that you stay as far away from the PC version as possible. While many may skewer me for the low score, remember that I can only review the copy I have and not, what I can only assume, is its much better Konsole Kounterpart –I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist one more terrible joke. Maybe all these problems on PC is why I managed to snag a copy for steam for only $19.99 right after launch…
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