It’s sad to admit it, but today’s gaming industry is in approximately the same unpleasant state that cinema was in in the eighties of the last century: there are no new ideas, everything around is the same, and designers are mainly busy churning out endless sequels, threequels and quadriquels (you yourself remember how many Call of Duty played last year?). Another popular activity is exporting nostalgia. We’re talking about the dominance of platformers and eight-bit retro, remakes, remixes and other cute trinkets that indie developers have learned to do so well.

The hero of this review is also a remake, and squarely so: just one look at MortalKombat , to guess that its authors drew inspiration from those very films of the eighties – hence the colorful ninjas, sorcerers in robes and Liu Kang, touchingly similar to Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and an enraged rhesus monkey at the same time. In general, this game looks like a typical child of postmodern orgies, but once you spend half an hour in it, it becomes clear that this is exactly the kind of fighting game that we have been missing all this time.

It was a tough fight

In “Gaming Mania,” games of this difficult genre appear relatively rarely for obvious reasons: the crisis of ideas described above has tormented fighting games much longer than all others. Until recently, most iconic TV series were closed in on themselves and were of interest to a narrow circle of enthusiasts. Take a look at the forum of any fighting game community: there you will be bombarded with incomprehensible words and abbreviations and will confuse your head with descriptions of the subtlest features of each character. Considering that the genre itself is quite difficult to master (those who tried to perform ultra-combos for Zangief in Street Fighter 4 , will understand us like no one else), for mere mortals this is somehow too much.

At the same time, Mortal Kombat is glaringly different from all its peers in the genre. It’s not just about the blood and crap (although it was the grotesque cruelty that helped make the series a career), but the fact that this fighting game was made by Americans – with a Western approach and in accordance with Western values. Mortal Kombat (let’s agree that from now on we are talking about a rebooted version of the game and politely ignore the years of stagnation) does not require samurai dedication and endurance from you, but this in no way means that it is primitive or superficial. It’s just that other things are valued here first and foremost – entertainment and a low barrier to entry. In short, this is a fighting game for normal people.

The most convincing proof of this is the plot. They try to attach some kind of story to almost every fighting game (you need to explain why these strangely dressed people are so persistent in trying to punch each other in the faces), but, as a rule, the story mode is, at best, short videos before battles, and at worst, a show of silent heads and kilometers of text.

In Mortal Kombat, everything is much cooler: the developers were not too lazy to make a whole story about how the god Raiden changed the future to save himself and the Earth – with cutscenes, dialogues and a seamless transition from battles to scripted scenes and back. The feeling is similar to watching the first film adaptation of the game: the dialogues are not burdened with any special meaning, the reasons for fights among the heroes are extremely far-fetched (even the traditional “why are you here” in residential areas)?!"), but visually everything is presented so cool that you immediately forgive the scriptwriters. Additionally, the campaign allows you to quickly delve into the history and cosmology of the setting, and also (since the heroes regularly replace each other according to the script) master the basic technique of playing for all the main characters.

Flawless victory

The actual battles are staged flawlessly – no worse than in the reference Street Fighter 4. Only unlike Capcom the authors of Mortal Kombat take themselves and their game a little less seriously, so Johnny Cage’s signature blow to the groin paralyzes the enemy in a very comical pose, Jax kisses his mechanical biceps after each victory, and Noob Saibot’s X-ray attack ends with a direct kick to the stomach, as a result of which the victim empties his stomach directly onto the ninja’s boot (Saibot, however, does not disdain and fights until the end of the match vomited).

There are not many https://winbet-casino.co.uk/ types of attacks, but each one is present in several variants – depending on how you combine it with the movement buttons. The situation is approximately the same with special moves and combos: each character gets on average three or four of them, but the scope for combinations is huge and allows you to make combos of ten hits or more. But the culmination of the battle is, of course, the X-ray attacks, during which defiantly crunching bones, cheerfully crumbling teeth and cheerfully tearing tendons are shown in great detail.

Moreover, what is significant is that such an attack is carried out with literally two buttons, it destroys up to a third of the health bar (and bullies like Goro can knock off half at once), but it is just as easy to block or avoid. All this is true for combos and super attacks: a rare technique forces you to use more than three buttons, some attacks (like teleportation with a simultaneous strike) look simply cheating, but they all turn out to be meaningless if you choose the wrong moment and hit the enemy in the block. And the retribution for a mistake will be quick and merciless, because counterattacking in MK is also very easy.

Such mechanics teach you to think in a new way in fighting games: when you don’t have to painfully remember combinations of moves and break your fingers trying to perform them, there is time to think about tactics. You begin to feel Mortal Kombat very quickly: over the course of the evening, even inexperienced players realize the importance of distance, learn to block and boldly repel air attacks with juicy uppercuts. It takes more time to get comfortable with combos, but the beauty of MK is that to successfully play it is enough to know basic attacks and special attacks. Well, if in some incomprehensible way you still have problems, the game provides a training mode, made with idiots of kindergarten age in mind. In short, to paraphrase the great master of capoeira Pastinho, the only way not to learn how to play Mortal Kombat is to not want to learn how to play it.

The new Mortal Kombat brings the fighting game genre back from the land of horror and hardcore back to ordinary people. Now it is hardly suitable for serious tournaments and championships: the characters are simply unbalanced. Let’s say Jax is too difficult to play, Liu Kang is, on the contrary, too easy, and Jade is boring. However, let’s return to the question of exporting nostalgia: those people who caught the first Mortal Kombat in the mid-nineties are now approaching the age when new things are more difficult to perceive, but the longing for the “good old” days is sharply intensifying. And at this moment NetherRealm helpfully lends them a shoulder: releases a game that looks like an old one, but plays in a completely new way. No decent geek can resist this.

At the same time, surprisingly, we could not come up with a single serious complaint against Mortal Kombat. The game is stylish, entertaining, varied, bloody to the point of hysterical laughter and user-friendly. In the end, it ideally replaces the boring Guitar Hero in the conditional list of “games for a noisy drinking session”. She is what we need: if this game were a woman, we would offer her our hand and heart without hesitation. And all that remains is to play until you are stupefied and have red streaks in your eyes. Just like in the “good old”.

Replay value — Yes

Cool story — No

Originality — No

Easy to learn — Yes

Gameplay: 10

Graphics: 9

Sound and music: 9

Interface and control: 9

We waited? The perfect fighting game for anyone who doesn’t like fighting games: Mortal Kombat is incredibly fun to play, but at the same time the desire to smash your controller into the wall does not occur more than once an hour.