Mortal Kombat 1 resets a series that was already at the height of its powers

thesixthaxis.com:

One of my favourite things about writing about MORTAL KOMBAT 1 is that my laptop has decided that the words MORTAL KOMBAT must be capitalised at all times. This is indeed how you must think it/shout it/sing it if you’re given half a chance. Even my laptop knows the power of the words. And now, so will you.

As you cleave your opponent in two, having already impaled their head on your sword, it’s easy to think that this is much the same Mortal Kombat. Bones crunch, sinews flop about and blood spurts from places that blood really shouldn’t spurt from. It is cacophonous and gleeful in its violence, but somehow, this isn’t gratuitous or actually all that gory. It is about victory, and that you are not on the receiving end of it.

Mortal Kombat 1 is a reset for this long-storied series – hell, we’ve had at least a few on NetherRealm’s journey to this point – but this is one that strips back many of the things we think we know about Mortal Kombat and makes them new again. Yes, you’re still performing acts of violence that a Dark Ages torturer would blush at, but narratively this is a new beginning.

We went hands on with the opening of the story mode at Gamescom 2023, reintroducing ourselves to those well-known combatants. They’re not the same as you might remember them, though. Raiden is a middling martial artist with nary a tickle of electricity, toiling in the fields with his companion and rival Kung Lao. Similarly, the Shang Tsung we meet begins as the wizened old man we know, but this is revealed as a ruse, a mask to win over the unwitting victims of the lacklustre potions and tonics he peddles.

It all goes wrong for the former series antagonist when a deeply unhappy patron arrives to tell him that his potions didn’t save his