Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate Review

Developer: NetherRealm Studios

Platforms: PC, PS5 (Reviewed), PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch

Genre: Action, Fighting

Publisher: Warner Bros. Games

Mortal Kombat 11 (MK11) is the 11th incarnation of the goriest fighting game ever. It has a superb mixture of realism and amazing combat and there is next-console updates and new additional fighters available.

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The visuals (dynamic 4K at 60 fps) and animation of the game stand out before anything else, the character design, voiceover, background and player movement is superb. I usually just button bash my way through fighting games but I did the tutorials to learn the moves. It was worth doing, the few hours put into the tutorials and training modes helped to immersive myself in a character (Liu Kang and Scorpion) and chain combos with a few special moves that I know. Once, I got a handle on a character or two, I decided to play the story mode which surprisingly is quite good and allows you to play as other characters. I don’t know the whole back story. In this episode, Raiden (a lightning god) is over with a desire to make sure no evil makes it to the earth realm. He becomes power crazy, tainted by evil and starts pre-emptively killing people which leads to Koronika (a time lord) to put balance back into the world and kill Raiden and remove him from history. It was interesting and gave lots of details and some explanation around each character and their place in the Mortal Kombat world. Other modes like Crypt (where you search for unlockables and upgrades) and the Towers (where you play an ever-increasing number of enemies in return for coins and power-ups) will keep you occupied.

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The gameplay is slick, fast and smooth. On the PS5, I did see the improvement from the previous-gen consoles, everything was slicker with higher frame rates. The load times are drastically reduced and it just feels more solid to play.

Each character has there own style, set of moves and fatality (finishing move). The finish moves are hyper-realistic and gore-tastic, they are quite sickening. Cinematic pre-rendered decapitations and extreme violence for which Mortal Kombat is known for is present and adds to the dark and sinister world you play. It’s just great fun to play and there are 25 characters to play from, online modes, local modes and much more. As I haven’t I played this in years, I’m nostalgic about the series and I thought this would taint my judgement, however, this game stands on its own two feet and uses the franchise to create a fun and ultimately slick game. If you want a good beat ’em up, you can’t go wrong with this. With the new additional expansion packs, there is a roster of up to 37 characters to play with.

If you own MK11 on the PS4 or Xbox One Consoles, you get the PS5/Xbox series updates for free. There is crossplay available between all consoles which is fantastic.

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