Mortal Kombat 11 Review (Rupti)
I haven't tried multiplayer, this review is about single player mode only
The last Mortal Kombat game I played was MK4, back when I was a kid, and I really liked it. At some point I stopped being interested in fighting games, but I always had fond memories of the Mortal Kombat series. I liked the characters, the weird nonsensical lore, the over the top violence... I even liked the movies, though that was probably because as a kid I didn't realize how bad they were (I found the new one pretty disappointing, although the brutal action scenes were definitely cool).
So when I got MK11, I was expecting a serious nostalgia kick, and while I did get that to some extent, the game wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. It was still fun enough that I put quite a lot of hours into it, and a lot of it works really well, but some aspects felt off or out of place. It may just be my old brain going "back in my day..." or it may be actual issues that would bother most players. I guess you'll be the judge of that.
Things I liked
+ The actual combat (or Kombat as the game keeps insisting on calling it) is genuinely really fun and satisfying, with a pretty high skill cap, lots of different combos, special attacks and defensive moves. Quick to pick up, but hard to master.
+ Catching up with characters I remember from my childhood and seeing where they are "today" was nice. Johnny Cage is a family man? Scorpion is good now? Liu Kang is a zombie? What the fuck did I miss? (The new characters are mostly also pretty cool).
+ "Towers of Time" gameplay mode uses the classic MK formula (a "tower" of fights where each win takes you higher until you fight the final boss at the end) but with fun twists - unique modifiers and challenges, consumables that change the fight, etc. Gives you quite a lot of fun single-player content.
+ Customization is pretty cool. You can not only modify the characters' appearance but also their moves, which means there are many different ways to play the same character.
Things I didn't like
- Requires a constant internet connection, even for the single player content. Lose your connection for 2 seconds in the middle of a Tower Of Time, and all your progress is gone. Connection to the MK servers sometimes drops for no apparent reason even if my internet is working fine (I found this happens mostly on weekends) forcing a restart of the game before connection can be reestablished.
- Grindy as f*ck. All consumables and customization content come from lootboxes. There are 3 types of currency - Koins, Souls and Hearts - and you get them from winning fights, getting long combo-streaks, doing fatalities or brutalities, etc. This means, if you want to truly progress, a fight where you didn't end with a fatality or brutality is a waste because you don't get hearts - so you just get used to doing one every fight. So get ready to see the same fatality over and over and over again until you absolutely can't be bothered to look at it anymore. From a cool thing you can do to get a brutal cinematic at the end of a fight, they turned it into a chore.
- Still on the topic of lootboxes - You don't just open them through some interface in the menu. What you do is, you go into Krypt mode, which is basically a 3rd-person semi-open-world exploration mini-game where you explore Shang Tsung's Island, solve puzzles, avoid traps, and... you guessed it: open lootboxes, which are just locked treasure chests scattered around the map. I genuinely don't know why this mode exists. The puzzles are extremely basic, the exploration is boring, the movement mechanics are serviceable at best, there is no real challenge or penalty for dying, and... once you've explored the whole place, it just becomes a really slow way to open more lootboxes because you have to run around aimlessly looking for them. Why?? Why put so much effort into designing such a completely pointless game mode that just gets in the way???
- The story is just... dumb, really. I mean, it's Mortal Kombat, it's always been ridiculous Kung-Fu B-movie nonsense, but I feel like they went a little overboard here. Time travel, resurrections, zombies, just so much crap that is clearly only there to try and find a way for our favorite characters to still somehow be in the game after fighting each other to the death over and over again. The thing is... if it's so easy to bring people back to life or reset the timeline or whatever, then... why does any of this even matter?
- The new final boss, Kronika, is just a terrible fight. She's immune to almost everything, so using your regular tactics on her isn't gonna work. Playing well isn't gonna work - combos, special moves, throws, etc - all of these are fairly useless. The only reliable way I found to beat her is to... jump and kick. Just keep doing this over and over again until she dies. This is what the big final boss fight has been reduced to. I even managed to get a flawless victory against her a couple of times by just jumping and kicking. On hard mode. What a joke
- Inevitably, it starts getting repetitive at some point. There are many characters I haven't actually tried yet, so I could try to mix things up that way, but... I think I've had enough.
I guess the bottom line is - while the core gameplay is very fun, many of the things around it aren't. I enjoyed my time with this game, but I think I'm gonna be taking another several-year break from the franchise now.