TRIVIALITY! Is Mortal Kombat X a Worthy Sequel?

Gory fatalities; very, very gory fatalities.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the rest of Mortal Kombat X.

The latest in NetherRealm Studio’s long line of fighting games, MKX is the direct sequel to the franchise saving Mortal Kombat 9. Because of this, the game has a lot to live up to not just in terms of gameplay, but in terms of continuing an entirely new story and bringing what many consider to be an arcade-age genre further into the era of online play.

A brand new feature of MKX is the ‘faction system’. The player must choose from one of five factions based on the MK universe. Each faction racks up points through the gameplay of its members, and the one with the highest score at the end of each week gains prizes such as unique ‘faction fatalities’. It’s a neat idea, even as far as video game faction systems in general are concerned, though I am sure that it goes without saying that hardly anyone is going to want to play as the ‘Special Forces’. How many times have they had their asses handed to them?

The game has a lot to live up to not just in terms of gameplay, but in terms of continuing an entirely new story and bringing what many consider to be an arcade-age genre further into the era of online play.

I cannot see every faction having an equal number of members, and for this reason it will be interesting to see if the online system in MKX is really a success. Street Fighter IV’s online system basically just had you fighting people online and gaining points and reputation for doing so. It was simple but unbiased, and suited online play that was based exclusively on pure skill. This week it appears that almost everyone has joined the Lin Kuei faction, and so I wonder how much of the online reward system is really fair, and not simply to do with which faction is the coolest (no pun intended).

Thankfully, MKX is a lot easier to pick up and play than Street Fighter. The character moves are all fairly easy to get the hang of and are all very well balanced. This is surprising, because the new additions to MKX have proven to be quite unique. New characters include Ferra/Torr, two fighters that work as a team, and D’Vora, who battles using insects. Another new feature is that each character has three styles to choose from which can impact the moves they’re capable of and how much damage they can do. This is a nice idea, but in all honesty it just makes the characters feel butchered. For example, Liu Kang can only do his bicycle kick if you choose the style that includes it. Some of us worked hard to get that move down in the last game, NetherRealm!

Let us now talk about the character roster. MK9 was a fan favourite because it brought in the characters from the original trilogy of games and introduced them into the story campaign in a way that gave them organic backgrounds and believable motivations. In MKX, a lot of the previous game’s cast are gone, with the pretext being that they’re still under the control of Quan Chi. This is strange, because a few of them come back anyway in a very pick ‘n mix fashion, either to defend Quan Chi or having been freed of him. It is particularly questionable because most of the others still turn up in the story, but their character interaction does not extend beyond a few lines of dialogue. This extends to new characters as well. The wind god Fujin shows up at one point, fighting alongside Raiden and kicking a lot of ass, and you could certainly be forgiven for thinking he was going to join the roster, but nope!

All of this made me rather suspicious of the game. Another thing was that Tanya, a character you actually fight in the story mode, is also not on the playable character roster, but is displayed as ‘coming soon’, via the almighty money making DLC. NetherRealm, if you’re going to introduce DLC characters then that’s fine. I’d love for more of the old cast to return! But don’t wave them about in front of us during the story campaign and then make us pay for them; that, sirs, is not toasty. Not toasty at all.

We also have a gang of new heroes, all related to the old. Cassie Cage is the daughter of Johnny and Sonya, Jacquie Briggs is the daughter of Jax, Takeda is Kenshi’s son who has been mentored by Scorpion, etc. They’re a nice group and fit well into the new universe; far more so, in fact, than MKX’s boss baddie, Shinnok. He is an old villain from the original timeline, and a fallen elder god, but he is no Shao Kahn. He is very easy to beat in the story, even after he transforms into his ‘corrupted’ form. He feels very much like a sissy response to the complaints about the difficulty of the Shao Kahn battles in MK9, and as a result there is no real sense of accomplishment for beating him.

In fact, a lot of aspects of this game make it seem easier than its predecessor. A big disappointment is the quick time events in the storyline, which ironically revolve around combat. Doing this in a fighting game seems detrimental to the game’s strengths which lie in actual player controlled fighting, and really should have just been part of a cutscene. Another niggling issue for me is that the fatalities are simple to do, only taking very simple button combinations to activate. Although there was a lot of hype about how gory they are, they have the same problem as the x-ray moves. They’re so easy to do that they quickly lose their shock factor. Also, strangely enough, they’re very lacking in blood. It’s very much teen based Friday 13^th gore, as opposed to consistently shocking Cannibal Holocaust gore. It goes back to the days where violence was the main thing that Mortal Kombat had to offer to make it unique, and this is a crying shame because so much else of what made MK9 a success seems to have been dialled down.

Overall, MKX is still a great game, but not a completely worthy successor to MK9. Its predecessor was determined to offer as much as possible, whilst MKX just feels either incomplete or intentionally easy. I also cannot shake off the feeling that the developers are planning to introduce a ludicrous amount of material as DLC. If you can ignore this, the game still offers a lot. The online play system has a lot of potential, if you get past the fact that anyone remotely cool is going to join the Lin Kuei (again, no pun intended), and the combat is very fluid and easy to get a hang of. Mortal Kombat X is still a top tier fighting game that is sure to delight fans and newcomers alike. I genuinely hope that more characters and stories will be released in the future, but I wish that more had been included from the start to make it more of a komplete game.