Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns is kompletely underwhelming

thesixthaxis.com:

For all the things it did well, Mortal Kombat 1 had a pretty rocky start, exhausting title-numbering changes aside. With crossplay absent at launch, microtransactions bogging down every moment of gameplay, and a lack of final polish, it wasn’t in the best spot on day one. Some pieces of the package shined out of the gate, though, and for me the thing that helped the game sing despite those launch woes was the story mode. In completely resetting it’s universe and dropping us into a new, remixed world crafted by the actions of Elder God Liu Kang, the messy fiction of the Mortal Kombat franchise was given a fresh-start that led to a lot of genuinely fascinating and gripping story moments. I was hopeful that the large new story mode featured in the Khaos Reigns expansion would build off of all that promise and potential, but instead I was left feeling disappointed.

The modern series had built up a very Marvel Cinematic Universe style approach to it’s story full of multi-dimensional character variants and crossover shenanigans that, ultimately, served to reach the goal of giving us the completely reset universe we see in Mortal Kombat 1. The Khaos Reigns story picks up immediately after the events of this game’s ending, which had teased with rote multiverse fanservice that is briefly exciting, but ultimately served to distract from the new universe and main timeline characters that the game had spent so long getting us attached to. That khaos is thankfully reigned back in the opening moments of this DLC story, as we instead focus on interesting lore built up in the main game like Bi-Han’s transformation into Noob Saibot and the feud between the Shirai Ryu and the Lin-Kuei.

It’s an incredibly strong start… but then the plot takes a complete sharp turn early on when Khaos Havik appears, signalling yet another MCU-ification of the Mortal Kombat story mode. Instead of a primary focus on the established characters and our new narrative threads, things immediately turn into an