User Reviews

Mortal Kombat 1 (2023) has exceeded expectations for me and hopefully for many others, as it has a unique story, classic characters, and stunning graphics.

Story: The story is a six-hour journey through the newly developed world created by Fire God Lu Kang. Uniquely developed, the story introduces you to many characters that have been re-created to have newly formed relationships. The story seems to put a lot of effort into characters that are much more minor, and that haven't gotten the attention they deserve in prior games. The mid-credit scene leaves you on the edge of your seat with its amazing ability to make you keep wanting more.

Lag: Although stunning, the game seems to have an issue (mostly in online gameplay) of lagging to such a degree it is almost impossible to play. As this is a newly released game, I am sure that the creators will jump into action and fix this issue immediately.

Invasion: Although not the Krypt, it is still a very interesting and unique new take on separate modes of gameplay. Set up in an almost board like way, you go through many small battles that allow you to earn new gear, accessories, and patterns for the twenty three amazing characters within the game. For me, it is an amazing new experience that I am sure people will love.

Kameo's: A newly adapted way to add other characters that have less popularity, these characters are people you can summon into battle. I think this is very good, as it is allowing us to see characters that haven't been adapted in many years. It also allows for a new look on battles as a whole.

This new Mortal Kombat game has exceeded all expectations for me, and all though there is much needed corrections with lag, the game has an overall great gameplay and beautifully adapted characters and story's. This is a must needed game for every single Mortal Kombat lover.

Over the last few years I have become a fan of Mortal Kombat, the first few trailers for the new game Mortal Kombat 1 had me super excited for this sequel/reboot and I have now played enough of it to review it, so here is my review for Mortal Kombat 1. The premise of the game is set after the events of Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath. Liu Kang has created a new timeline which sees legendary characters reimagined and able to make their own decisions in the new era.

Characters After the events of the previous game Lord Liu Kang is now the protector of Earthrealm and I really like his character progression. He is now the god in this universe and he plays the role really well, he has clearly tried to help as many characters get a fresh start and his new timeline is interesting.

There are some iconic characters who are changed up such as Raiden, Kung Lao, Scorpion & Sub-Zero. They are all so different from the previous timeline and I like how the game really doubled down on it and gave them the attention that they deserve.

But some of the lesser known characters also got time to shine with Reptile, Baraka & Mileena all having way more to do then they have in previous titles. It makes this game feel fresh and new to fans of the franchise and I give the game real credit for that.

Pretty much every character is great (apart from Nitara) and I really give credit for to the developers for fleshing them out and making them more interesting then they have ever been.

Story The story is a reboot/sequel and it does a brilliant job changing up establish characters and setting this up as a new but exciting timeline. It gives lesser characters important roles and is a fresh story that kept me guessing throughout. However, I do have a complaint and it is one I had in Mortal Kombat X. There are 2 characters here who play major roles in the story but are paid DLC, it means they are complete and Neatherealm are making us pay extra for characters that should already be a part of the roster. Also I am used to having dialogue between the characters in the other modes but it isn't here and it makes the game feel a bit lifeless.

Side Activities The game adds a new mode called invasions. It is basically a board game type simulation where you go between short fights with modifiers and gaining unlocks. I actually enjoyed it and switching between characters for tactical advantages. I mean, I couldn't play it for long spells because it becomes repetitive and dull but in short doses its pretty fun. I also had quite a lot of fun with multiplayer, I am not great at the game but for the most part I managed to hold my own and get some wins. Towers is the same as usual and does a decent job in keeping me interested with some good character endings. However, it just feels like something is missing. The lack of creativity in the customisation and the lack of a Krypt this time does make certain aspects feel a little under developed.

Gameplay The one thing that hasn't let Mortal Kombat games down is the gameplay. The game is a lot of fun and flows really nicely. All the characters feel unique and that time has really been taken to craft them and make them play really well. This game introduces Kameo Fighters, they assist you in battle and all feel different, its a fantastic addition to the game and adds more layers to the gameplay. Fatalities are brutal as always and violence is definitely still here in the bucketloads.

Graphics The game looks fanatastic and continues the great graphics from the previous game. It looks incredibly life like and full of colour. The Stages that the battles take place on are so in depth and it is clear that care has been put in to make it all unique. As I mentioned Fatalities and Brutalities are over the top and the violence is still at the forefront of the franchise.

Overall Overall, Mortal Kombat 1 is a great game that I thoroughly enjoyed, It feels like a great fresh start for the franchise and though I still think improvements can be made this is a great step in the right direction.

Rating - 8/10.

Say No To Losers Teen Wolf Tyler Posey ("Fast & Furious 6" "The Masked Singers" With "Legendary" & "Fast & Furious: Spy Racer") & Colton Haynes ("Teen Wolf") Only Yes Winners Tyler Posey ("Fast & Furious 6" "The Masked Singers" With "Legendary" & "Fast & Furious: Spy Racer") & Colton Haynes ("Fast & Furious 6" "A High School Rockstar" With "CSI: Miami" & "Speed Racer") Most Underrated Very good Really Good 10/10 10\10 Perfectly 100% 100.0% Greatest Of Full-Time 10 Stars Best Fighting Tournament Action Thriller Action With Sports Action and Horror Action Game Ever Strong Rating High Critical and Maximal 100.0% 100%

Where do I start?

A full price £60 game that launched with no basic features like crossplay, riddled with black screens, desyncs that ruin every game mode is probably a good place.

Let's do a short comparison SF6 during pre launch beta + Full crossplay + Flawless netcode +Wifi filter +practice while searcing for matches + handful of bugs were found and were fixed within 48 hours

MK1 on full launch -no crossplay -worst netcode in the gaming world bar none

• no wifi filter, forcing you to accept ranked matches with connections bad enough to guarantee drops

-massive bugs, including a bug that gave player 1 a gigantic advantage because people in player 2 position's characters were bugged in a way that prevented their combos from connecting as they should. Nrs gave a time frame to fix this, failed to fix it in that time frame and in total took around 9 days to fix this one single bug, all the rest are still there

• microtransactions included on launch, you cant play against other platforms, you cant have 1 full match without disconnecting but you can spend £20 to buy a helmet that is a slightly different shade of silver for 1 characte

...... it's a joke

They also completely ignored all of the feedback that 11 got because they kept the 2 worst things ever to be implemented in any video games ever.

1: Fatal blow, a cheap mechanic that rewards people for losing by granting them access to a cinemtaic, therefore unbreakable 30%+ attack. Pre launch they lied and said that the armour wasn't instant so they werent free win buttons like in mk11, but between the beta test and full relese they buffed fatal blows so they are exactly the same as 11.

2: Towers of time, this is inexplicably how cany anybody, let alone a company that has been "developing" games for 3 decades think it is a good idea to take video games, a purely visual form of escapism and put "modifiers" in it that make the screen completely black so the player cant see whats going on? Well nrs have done just that yet again, but it's even worse than it sounds. In 11 there were monotonous rotating towers, in 1 there is "invasion" mode which is those same monotonous, modifier ruined towers but now you cant just enter a tower, you have to control a low quality flash game looking sprite of your character, run around an empty world, stuck on rails and play what can only be described as a mobile game in between getting to towers Also on this same point they have made the modifiers even dumber than mk11 because they are more consistent, in mk11 blindness was common, in 1 it is constant as is giving the ai armour so you cannot even make use of the tedious matches to practice combos and timing because it is literally not possible to combo the armoured enemies, even if the screen wasnt black.

There are so many things worth mentioning I am struggling to decide what to write in the given character limit in this site.

• Graphics are a massive downgrade from 11
• PS4 didn't get it but switch did, even though 95% of nrs player base are on ps4
• PC port was outsourced as cheap as possible and given to the same company who in 4 years never fixed any of the bugs in mk11 on pc
• it runs at 30fps and has frame drops, it factually has worse performance and runs at worse frame rates than psp games
• there are no rooms, so trying to coordinate matching with people you know/frequently play against is much more difficult than it needs to be
• They removed the ability to pin moves to the screen so if you are labbing a new character you constantly have to pause and scroll through 1 menu and 2 sub menus to find the move

-They use the exact same painfully boring KL system, guaranteeing there will be no character variety at any point in this games lifecycle

• the frame data is hidden in the movelilst and there is no option to save it to open by default, so every single time you open the menu you need to unhide frame data
• at the moment the claimed frame data in the moveslist are wrong across the board
• you cannot practice while waiting for matches, which combined with nrs cheap servers means you will spend on average 15 minutes watching a loading screen for every 3 minutes of actual gameplay
• it is a 96gb install but 95gb of that is locked on the server side, which means when the cheap servers go down, which they do every 5 minutes you lose access to 99.9% of a game that you paid for
• there is no crossplay at launch
• no crossplay for pc ever
• even without crossplay the servers cant even handle the low amount of traffic and game drops are very very very common
• "customisation" is a blatant lie, only 2 items can be changed per character outfit and weapon and even then what nrs call an "outfit" is actually just a slight colour palete change
• ^ in order to get those "different" cosmetics you need to grind for hours in the invasions mode, then go to the "shrine" which is a loading screen where you use 1000 tokens at a time and each time you do you have to watch a 45 second loading screen of a dragon statue slightly lighting up and then generating 1 rng item. You cannot speed this up, cannot spend more than 1k at once, cannot auto spend, you need to do it manually
• the playable characters are watered down and utterly one dimensional, there is no variety whatsoever, raiden for example has 1 string which serves every purpose, it opens people up, launches, extends combos, ends combos, punishes and is safe on block so there is no reason to ever use any other string he has so both playing him or playing against him is already so boring it's not even fair to classify it as "gameplay"
• it is objectively the most unbalanced fighting game in existence, as always the nrs dev favourites got loaded with every possible strength ( fast attacks, safe strings, high damage, versatile specials, long range punishes, easy combos, easy conversions etc etc) while the rest of the characters got few to none of those.

• it has less gameplay and less creativity than the games nrs were producing in 2002, fewer game modes, no mercy, no animalities, no babalities, the fatalities are the worst they've ever been, just skeletons left right and centre no detail in the models or animations at all, no motor kombat, no create a fighter.

It is objectively and easily proven to be a worse game in every measurable manner than games from 21 years ago from this same company and there isn't any justification for it, they are just lazy and dont care. Ed boon hates mk but won't drop it because it's guaranteed profit but at the same time neither he or his employees will even pretend to care enough to put in any amount of bare minimum effort, resulting in what we have here.

Geezus. This game is horrible.

The tutorials have to be the single worst gaming's experience I've ever encountered. Before its release, we were assured that the tutorials wouldn't be as millimetre precise as 11 and X were - and they were right. It's far more precise. 99% of the combos don't actually come out and on the very very very very rare occasion they do, they don't hit the target because you were standing just a little too close or just a little too far from your opponent.

Secondly, playing that game on anything other than VERY EASY mode requires you to be an absolute expert of the game and genre, even though this game promised a reboot to draw in new fans. I've been an MK fan since the beginning, and the last great MK game was Armageddon, because that was challenging and difficult but not impossible. Every iteration of MK in the last decade has been designed for hardcore fighter players, and guess what? There are some of us that like a number of genres rather than just sticking to one style of gameplay. Another lie from MK producers.

Thirdly, the game essentially requires players to buy extra content to advance (unless you've got the skills to defeat the game over and over again on the hardest levels to get more koins). In-game purchases should be limited to things like extra skins or whatnot, but this one requires koins just to unlock new moves or characters, which are core features of a fighting game.

The framerate during some of the fatalities and even regular combos leaves a lot to be desired.

And I'm tired of the same old graphics engine used in EVERY MK game lately. The original MK games felt more solid, more brutal. These look far too 'shiny' and clean to be taken anything more seriously than a DC live action movie - everything looks fake. The fire/ice effects, all the glowing symbols when you attack/block/dash/air combo/combo, etc just look cheap and overdone. It's highly unimpressive and, for a game that was supposed to be a reboot, it's just another MK11 and X all over again. But worse.

This is what happens when you have Asian game players producing a game for Asian players - you have to be super fast with your reflexes, hit buttons at the exact precise moments and only when your opponent is at the exact precise location on screen AND at a time when you know they aren't blocking, moving, ducking, jumping or doing their own move (which is nigh on impossible)...and then, if you happen to land the beginning of a combo, you have to hope that your AI powered opponent doesn't have the world's greatest Asian MK players reflexes to block or counter your attacks.

I am now 100% done with all MK titles. Shaolin Monks needs to be remade, but other than that I cannot and will not trust another MK game for the rest of time. These Asian game developers need to go back to what made these kinds of combat games great, and it wasn't the button-bashing crap that they've pushed down our throats. MK used to be challenging for other reasons, namely the opponents were stronger and faster, but if you were fast enough you could still beat the game even on the hardest level. Now, anyone that is anything less than an expert combat game player cannot get any enjoyment out of this frustrating, button-bashing, expert precision timing MK games that are being produced lately - and it's clear that casual gamers who used to enjoy the series are now relegated to watching demos and read Reddit posts just to get through the most basic levels.

What a joke. I hope MK either dies completely after this game, or the game is actually rebooted properly for real fans and not the Asian world cup holding gamers.

I realized a long time ago that the developments of Mortal Kombat are real talkers. Mortal Kombat 1 just confirmed it. I can't be a fan of this series anymore. I'm tired of developers Mortal Kombat. This is not a Mortal Kombat, but a nightmare. The graphics are worse than in Mortal Kombat 11, the characters smile at each other for some reason, constantly crashes. It's not worth wasting your time on this at all. The ratings of the game are intentionally overestimated. She is not worthy of the award she received. It would be better if everything ended on Mortal Kombat 11. I do not know to what extent you need to sit in pink glasses to believe in MK1. That's it, Mortal Kombat is dead... I'm not even betting 0 out of 10.

If your here wondering if you should pick up this game at your local store so you can see what the newest edition of mortal kombat looks like you might want to get 11, mk1 is single handedly the worst game and I mean absolutely devastating blow to the mortal kombat franchise, the whole game is based around transactions so you can play it, and dont get me started on the roster, it doesn't even have a tenth as many characters to play with then 11 had, the customization is terrible the only way to be good is spend countless hours or just button mash like an idiot, this whole game had so much hype and basically died out as soon as it actually came out. Seriously dont waste your money/time in this piece of garbage. Some people arnt gonna like what I said but its the truth.