When Midway went under, the fate of the Mortal Kombat license was in limbo. Warner Bros wisely snatched up the license and now it looks like we’re in for the most compelling Mortal Kombat title in years.
Shown behind closed doors, Mortal Kombat (a working title I’m sure), is coming to the Xbox 360 and PS3. The series has returned to its ultraviolent roots, and I can tell you that it’s easily the most violent Mortal Kombat ever. Furthermore, the series returns to 2D for the first time in many years.
I witnessed several battles showing off a variety of features. The character selection screen showed Scorpion, Reptile, Kung Lao, Johnny Cage, Millena, Sektor, and Nightwolf. Most of these have slightly different looks than you may remember from the last time that you’ve seen them, but all of them are recognizable and look great.
Fatalities are back and in a big way. I don’t know how many each character has, but they seem to be all knew (or variations of classic ones in some cases) and they’re as violent as ever. Stage fatalities are back too, including a beautiful redo of the original Pit. Other stages I saw included The Living Forest (first seen in MK II) and Shao Kahn’s Coliseum. The Coliseum was awesome — Shao Kahn is sitting in his throne and in the background is a large hell beast fighting off some miscellaneous warriors. You can’t help but notice the detail in the backgrounds and they are simply gorgeous. From the buzzards picking the meat off of a bones in The Living Forest to the detailed gore at the bottom of The Pit, the stages have never looked better and easily rival the best stages in the genre.
A new meter gameplay element has been added too. I don’t fully understand the details of it, but it has a few tiers to it. If you save up your entire meter, you can execute an X-ray move. The X-ray moves are powerful attacks that not only do a lot of damage, but also change the way the game looks. During an X-ray attack, the camera focuses on different body parts of the victim, and shows them as they would be seen through an x-ray. This allows you to see the bone smashing hits as they make impact. Chained together with a normal combo and we saw damage rates as high as 49%.
We were also told that combos in MK weren’t going to be a matter of memorizing long sequences of commands, which was good news to hear. Combos are apparently going to be much more free flowing, allowing the player to come up with their own variations.
Getting back to the graphics for a moment, I wanted to mention that as characters take damage, they continue to look more and more messed up from round to round. It’s a neat effect.
The new MK also includes a tag team mode. Players can tag in another player normally, or bring them in and instantly execute an attack maneuver.
As a fan of MK since 1992, I’m happy to see the franchise back and looking as good as it does in this build.
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