Mortal Kombat 1 For Switch Review

ign.com:

When I first heard that Mortal Kombat 1 would be skipping the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, but would in fact, be coming out on the Switch, my first thought was, “Surely that means that it’s going to be one of those cloud version-only games like Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and so on. But I was wrong: Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch is a straight-up port, running directly off the Switch hardware, and yes, that is as bad of an idea as it sounds.

Before we begin, please check out my Mortal Kombat 1 review for the version that’s on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC to get a full overview and my critiques of it. Long story short: MK1 is great! There are exciting changes to the gameplay formula in the form of the Kameo system, the fighting itself feels fresh thanks to some smart tweaks to how combos are structured, and the story mode is fantastic, even if some of its online features feel outdated and the Invasions mode doesn’t quite land.

Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch can claim all of those things too, but the technical limitations of the hardware make experiencing them feel like you’re trudging through whatever sludge Reptile crawled out of. Let’s get the most obvious knock against it out of the way first: It looks abysmal compared to the other versions. Character models lack detailed textures, the expressive facial animations of the current-gen versions are highly compromised to say the least, clothing – and sometimes even skin – constantly stretches and clips through body parts, and every so often you can even see straight through them. Those absolutely gorgeous stages that I praised in my other review look like they had a heavy gaussian blur filter applied to them in Photoshop and briefly made me think