Review: Mortal Kombat 11 Is Well-Executed, But It’s a Hell of a Grind

The game is at its most entertaining and gleeful when it is, indeed, just Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat 11
Photo: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

At the heart of Mortal Kombat 11 is a great fighting game—one from a studio, NetherRealm, that clearly learned all the right lessons from not just Mortal Kombat X but Injustice 2. By and large, the studio has divined the winning formula for thoughtful, tactical, and satisfyingly brutal gameplay. Which makes it all the more baffling that much of the game seems to begrudge players their enjoyment of it.

That’s even more bewildering considering no Mortal Kombat game has ever been this comprehensive about teaching you how to actually play it. There’s an exhaustively dense tutorial that teaches you literally everything there is to know about the game’s mechanics, from the numerous strategic escape and counter moves you can perform, to the game’s Fatal Blow system, a simple two-button ultimate move that functions like a hyperviolent counterpart to Super Moves from the Injustice games. There’s even a section that explains attack frames, generously opening up a bridge for casual players who hope to one day hang tough with the pros. Most useful, however, are the character tutorials that offer a basic primer on each character’s specific moveset. It’s rare and truly heartening to see a game that doesn’t have Arc System Works’s name on it be so thorough about preparing its players for battle.

The game is also rather good at giving players just the right amount of context for each fight, via its Story Mode. Here, the game leans hard, and in winking fashion, into its Saturday-afternoon B-movie trappings. The game picks up directly after its predecessor, with the thunder god Raiden now a megalomaniac, corrupted by coming in contact with fallen Elder God Shinnok’s amulet. Seeing as this is a direct result of Raiden screwing around with the fabric of time in Mortal Kombat 9, the goddess of time herself, Kronika, steps in to correct the problem in the extreme: She decides to merge the original Mortal Kombat timeline—which covers the first game through the eighth, Mortal Kombat Armageddon—with the current one in hopes of breaking the entire space-time continuum and starting anew.

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Plenty of multiverse shenanigans ensue, with old Mortal Kombat characters meeting their changed counterparts and dead villains returning to wreak havoc. The game’s story is a wild, freewheeling kung-fu/sci-fi mashup that knows better than to stop and get too bogged down in the gritty minutiae of time travel when just letting Johnny Cage quip or Scorpion and Sub-Zero beat up robot ninjas is so much more engaging.

More than anything, the Story mode provides context for the game’s bread-and-butter single-player and online Versus modes, especially with the tiny character interactions that occur before and during matches. Combine that with the expected cherry on top—a slew of brand-new creative, surreal, and horrifying Fatalities—and we could have had a Mortal Kombat 11 that was a gloriously bloody and deep fighting game that builds impressively on the gameplay principles of its forebears. But NetherRealm then proceeds to drown that game in a collection of appallingly unfriendly and unrewarding mechanics that begin to sour the entire package.

New to Mortal Kombat 11 is the ability to fully customize every character to each player’s liking, from their special move loadout, to their weaponry, to their costumes, to their intro and win poses. Theoretically, it’s a wonderful idea, and there’s a plethora of options in each category to allow for some truly unique builds. The problem is that you earn most of these customization options through the Towers of Time and the Krypt.

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The Towers of Time are a series of four to eight consecutive matches, not unlike the old-school Arcade modes in prior Mortal Kombat games. The caveat is that each opponent may possess randomized buffs and each stage may have various debilitating hazards. You can use buffs and magic and assist items, earned through the course of gameplay in the Towers, but the game is stingy with it all, and few are as utterly devastating as what the CPU can use. So many of the hazards and buffs that your quite aggressive CPU opponents can utilize are literally unavoidable, and, unfortunately, completing the full gauntlet of Towers for specific characters is the only definitive way to unlock the vast majority of a specific character’s arsenal.

For everything else, there’s the Krypt. What was traditionally just a spooky treasure-laden grid strictly for unlocking bonus content is now a third-person, fully explorable recreation of Shang Tsung’s island from the first game, with a motion-captured Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa performing some grandiose, scenery-chewing fanservice, reprising his role from the now-cult-classic Mortal Kombat film from 1995. That’s delightful, again, in theory. In reality, aside from a few exceptions locked to specific locations, the Krypt’s content is randomized, as are the prices for opening each treasure trove within. The game is also grudging with that currency, of which there are four different kinds. If that’s appalling enough in a game like Destiny, it’s unfathomable why that’s the case for a Mortal Kombat title’s bonus area, especially since there isn’t even a guaranteed way of getting exactly what you want for a character in the Krypt.

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It’d be infuriating but understandable if this was all to funnel players to spending real money in the game’s store to unlock everything, but a revolving door of salable items means you can’t even cherry pick from there either. The end goal of all this seems to be to keep players trapped grinding for currency in the fervent hope that they will unlock something they want, but the needless grind is likely to tire players long before they actually get to unlock everything. It’s the gaming equivalent of a cable company that offers excellent internet but uses every shady tactic in the book to offer you the landline telephone package. The sole saving grace is that the game’s beating heart—its combat—is so well-executed. Mortal Kombat 11 is at its most entertaining and gleeful when it is, indeed, just Mortal Kombat. It’s at its most utterly repellent when it’s trying to be Mortal Kombat Mobile.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: NetherRealm Studios  Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: April 23, 2019  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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