Mortal Kombat 1 Review: A Flawless Victory for NetherRealm

gamepur.com:

It’s a great day when a new entry in the most iconic fighting franchises draws out the “Mortal Kombat” warcry from its fans. There’s little that compares to yelling this famous line in your living room while throwing fireballs at your opponent and poking out the eyes of giant demons as they cry out in agony. Okay, that last point was a bit much, but I’m sure you get the idea that there’s no game on the planet that delivers satisfying visceral combat like NetherRealm Studios’ hit flagship fighting series.

They’ve been perfecting the series for decades, and after playing their latest effort in Mortal Kombat 1, they finally found the working formula for the future. Unfortunately, this comes after the series struggled to find its footing in the new era that came after the SNES and Sega Genesis. At that time, the industry started to shift towards 3D graphics, and Mortal Kombat, being a 2D series, wanted to keep up with the trends being set around them.

For a while, the main numbered releases and some of the spinoffs took the series in all kinds of directions, including titles like Mortal Kombat: Special Forces and Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, where they completely abandoned the fighting genre and tried to expand to a beat-em-up audience.

Oddly, it wasn’t until the release of Injustice that NetherRealm Studios found a formula that worked for them while keeping the series’ identity intact. For those unfamiliar with the Injustice series, it’s a DC Comics spinoff featuring its superheroes in a Mortal Kombat-esque 2D fighting game. It wasn’t nearly as bloody, of course, but a lot of the principles of the game would carry over to future development up to and including Mortal Kombat 1. I mention this because Mortal Kombat 1 is