Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat – One Hour Demo Impressions

Mortal  Kombat was recently added to the full game demo list on PSN+. If your new to PSN+ its just a special subscription where you can get games for free/discount or play the full game (in this case)  Mortal Kombat for one hour. Back in the day Mortal Kombat was the poster-boy for videogame hate groups for its brutality or should i say its Fatalities. After a long hiatus Mortal Kombat is back and better than ever judging from the one hour demo. NetherRealm Studios are the developers and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment the publishers. Mortal Kombat originally released on April 19, 2011 for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. The VITA will get a release April 2, 2012.

The main menu broke down into Fight, Story Mode, Challenge Tower, Training, Online, Extras and Options. One thing this fighting doesn’t lack is content.Whether its Challenge Tower or Online mode Mortal Kombat has multiple gaming options to keep you playing for a long time. For instance the Extras section has unlockable content that you can purchase. Not only that but there are a Necropolis section, a place to Redeem Codes,  Character Trailers and Announcement trailers. Navigating all of the menus was pretty easy do to Mortal Kombat’s menu ergonomics. For as much content that is present i expected some issues finding everything but that wasn’t the case at all.

The controls via Duel Shock 3: Square- Punch, Triangle-Back Punch, X-Front Kick, O-Back Kick, R1-Throw, L1-Tag, R2-Block and L2-Flip Stance. As far as controls go they created a really good gameplay experience. It feels like your playing old school Mortal Kombat all over again due to the controls and button layout. Performing moves wasn’t an issue with me thanks to the tight controls. After going through the menus and control layout it was time to play. I choose Story Mode first with the attention of getting it out of the way first.

Story mode in Mortal Kombat starts off with a fairly lengthly opening cutscene detailing the ending and beginning of the Mortal Kombat tournamaent. You start off playing Chapter 1: Johnny Cage. The story mode has snippets of storylines infused with each character you fight with. You do bounce from charcater to character during story mode. Story Mode was average. Its basically some cutscenes and voiced dialog mixed in with fighting. I had just one hour with this game so i moved on immediately to Ladder Match.

Ladder Match is the classic Mortal Kombat set-up where you just jump in and fight a ladder of opponents and hopefully reach the top. I picked Kratos for all my matches throughout the demo. I mean he is Kratos afterall. He can use the Bow, Hermes Boots and Helios’s Head from God of War 3. Kratos can probably use many other special abilities from God of War 3 but those are the ones i performed while playing. I played a few Ladder Matches which weren’t too difficult on normal difficulty. One level had me fighting in a city with cars racing in front of Kratos. Off in the distance you can see a huge monster destroying buildings. Next i played Challenge Tower which is a training tutorial/practice section. You can learn fatalities and complete tests to hone your fighter’s skills. Challenge Tower is where you should practice.

And last but not least i spent the rest of my hour playing Online mode. When you log into the online servers your greeted with a “Message of the Day” from the devs. Online sub-menus include: Ranked Match, Player Mtach, Private Match, Join Room, Create Room, User Statistics and Leaderboards. I spent my time in Ranked Match. There you can play one on one or tag-team matches. There were quite a few individual rooms with groups of players available also. I completed all of matches from quick matchmaking. As far as connections go i had only one freeze while connecting to a match.

As far as gameplay goes its fun. Its easy to perform Breakers. I couldn’t do any finishing Fatalities which blew. Many experienced players i played against online had no problem pulling them off on me however. The online competitive multiplayer was fun as you imagined and whould be the place i spent most of my time if i did buy Mortal Kombat. Although the in-game cutscenes wern’t impressive visually the actual in-game fighting looked and sound great.

The art design and texture work makes Mortal Kombat one goodlooking fighting game. And not to mention the x-ray bone crushing moves you can perform. Mortal Kombat looks great but is very gruesome to look at. The sound design brings back memories everytime i heard “FIGHT” before the match. The voice acting during cutscenes were mediocre which was expected. When everything is laid out in front of me its easy to say the presentation is good in Mortal Kombat.

From my one hour i spent with Mortal Kombat i will go on record and call it a very good fighting game. I do love my Street Fighter more but Mortal Kombat was really impressive. Thanks for reading.