Mortal Kombat 1 held its closed beta for preorder customers over the weekend, and I found a little time to play it. This was my first chance to go hands-on with NetherRealms’ latest, umpteenth expression of its enduringly popular fighting franchise.
Mortal Kombat 1 is a ground-floor reboot of the franchise, an attempt to reset its increasingly convoluted canon. It’s a story with more than a few amusing parallels to DC Comics’ canon-resetting Crisis on Infinite Earths, a company that NetherRealm works with fairly regularly on Injustice, its franchise of MK-styled superhero fighters.
None of that story, however, appeared in the game’s preorder beta. What DID appear were two modes — the classic single-player tower climb, and 1v1 unranked online multiplayer.
Most of my time with the Mortal Kombat 1 preorder beta was spent in the single-player mode, trying out its clutch of six heroes — Liu Kang, Sub-Zero, Kenshi, Kitana, Johnny Cage, and Li Mei. These fighters are supported by one of four tag-team partners in Kano, Sonya Blade, Jax, and Frost. Tag team fighters can be deployed during a fight on a cooldown, leaping in to perform a single move, and darting out again. They’re useful for buying you a second to breathe before the fight resumes.
The Tower Climb arcade mode is as you remember it — a list of fighters you need to take on, one by one, as you make your way to the top of the tower and High Score screen glory. There’s still a mirror match, and your opponents get tougher as you get higher up the order. If you flog your computer-controlled opponent in the first round, they still get more aggressive in the second. It’s all very familiar, and that’s just fine by me.
In terms of its broader fighting mechanics, if you’ve played a Mortal Kombat game in the last decade or so, you already know what you’re in for. MK1 feels like it doesn’t stray far from the established formula (if it ventures off the well-worn path the franchise has carved for itself at all). That’s not necessarily a bad thing — where fighting games are concerned, there’s value in familiarity. I was able to jump right into the preorder beta and feel at home immediately, moves and combos coming back to me round-by-round. The fighting still has that slightly stiff feel the series has had since its earliest incarnations, but which serves to make footwork all the more important.
It’s still violent as hell, too. By the end of one particularly savage round against Kenshi that left me under 5% health, my Liu Kang looked like he’d been dragged beneath a truck. He was torn to shreds, blood pouring down his chest and clothes like some kind of horrible bib.
Desperation moves return as well, allowing players to hit L1+R1 when under 10% health. These moves unleash (literally) bone-crushing damage and animations, replete with character xrays showing the extent of the internal damage. It’s still very funny to me to watch Johnny Cage’s entire rib cage shatter like a glass Coke bottle down a staircase, his neck broken with a savage twist, only to stand up seconds later like “I’m okay.” That darkly comic timing has always been a facet of the series, and it’s nice to see that it hasn’t gone anywhere as the years have worn on.
I didn’t get time to figure out any of the Fatalities, so I haven’t seen how gory the game can truly get, but I’m sure they’re as revolting as ever.
The online multiplayer was fine, if a little hitchy and laggy. It’s hard to make any solid judgments about this mode from a weekend-long beta. The player count is small, restricted to those who’ve preordered the game, and who knows where the servers are located. All I can say is that the online multiplayer wasn’t really there for this beta, but that I will be very interested to see how it goes when the game enters full release and we have dedicated local servers.
One point I will absolutely concede to Mortal Kombat 1 is that, even in this preorder beta, its clear to see how beautiful it is. NetherRealm are making some of the most graphically complex fighting games in the industry. Its animations and motion capture, the facial expressions of its characters, and even the detail lavished on their clothing are leagues ahead of any other developer in the fighting game space. You can certainly argue that stylised approaches like Street Fighter 6 are more beautiful, and I don’t think you’d be wrong to do so, but among those aiming for realism, NetherRealm is way out in front. Even in this vertical slice, the quality of its visuals was a standout.
So, where does the preorder beta leave me on Mortal Kombat 1? It leaves me feeling pretty positive. I am very interested to see how it fares against Street Fighter 6, a functionally perfect fighting game that has already made its way into numerous draft GOTY lists. Where SF6 needed to make significant changes, MK1 feels like its content to stay the course, making its setting and story the crux of its changes and letting its time-honoured fighting mechanics speak for themselves.
You’ll be able to play it for yourself next month when the game launches for PlayStation and Xbox platforms, Switch and PC on September 14, 2023.
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