Play Your Heart Out: “Mortal Kombat 1”

“Mortal Kombat 1” is a fighting game developed by NetherRealm Studios and published by Warner Bros. Games. It was released on Sept. 14, 2023, and is currently available to play on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows.

“Mortal Kombat 1” is the twelfth game in the Mortal Kombat series and is the start of the series’ second reboot after “Mortal Kombat” (1992) and “Mortal Kombat” (2011). In the campaign, you play as Earthrealm’s champions tasked with winning the Mortal Kombat tournament against Outworld, a mystical realm full of otherworldly humanoids. Additionally, mysterious forces are engaged in a realm-wide conspiracy, which leads to you fighting many opponents and making unexpected allies along the way.

In the game, you can play as a plethora of different characters ranging from Liu Kang, a god of fire and master of time, to Nitara, a girlboss vampire voiced by Megan Fox, and many others. New additions to this game include Kameo Fighters, which are classic characters that partner up with your chosen character to expand their moves and combo abilities. You are encouraged to play through the tutorial before you start the campaign, which teaches you the basic moves, but afterwards you are free to create movesets and combos specific to the character and playstyle of your choice.

My playstyle mostly involves spamming buttons until my goal is achieved, but I still find the gameplay enjoyable, possibly even more so than its predecessor, “Mortal Kombat 11.” I play the game on the easiest difficulty in order to maximize my enjoyment and make me feel better about myself through easily defeating opponents I would have otherwise struggled against in higher difficulties. My most-played character so far is Reptile, a shapeshifter who can change between his human and reptilian forms, which each have their own unique special moves.

I am objectively not great at fighting games versus other genres of video games, but I still thoroughly enjoyed sitting down to play this game and would stay up until the wee hours of the morning to get playtime in. There are a lot of extensive cutscenes during the campaign that sometimes make it feel more like a TV show with occasional input from the player rather than a video game, but the breaks do allow you to stretch your fingers from previous button-mashing. 

Other than the campaign, though, there is also the Invasions gamemode, which allows you to play through different levels of a single player story that changes every month or so.

The ability to take my emotions out on fictional computer characters in the most gruesomely creative ways is what makes me love the Mortal Kombat games, regardless of how bad I actually am at them. Thankfully, this new game is amazing,considering the exorbitant cost I paid for the premium edition to get access to the DLC characters: Peacemaker, Homelander, Omni-Man, and more in the near future. According to what I have read online, it takes about 10 hours to beat the campaign and 31 hours to obtain 100% completion, which I will put even more effort into accomplishing once I can use the superhero characters I know and love.

I give this game a rating of 9/10.