Knights of the Cardboard Castle

As I’ve previously written in this blog, I have a spot soft for fighting games even though I’m completely rubbish at them. And the Mortal Kombat series has always been the guiltiest pleasure of them all. At that time, not knowing much about games, I only thought that the series had more realistic, less stylized graphics than its contemporaries and of course its famously gratuitous ultra-violence. Now that I’m somewhat more knowledgeable about game design decisions, I thought it might be interesting to check out this reboot of the franchise. And of course to indulge in some low-brow senseless violence.

• I was at first put-off by the relatively low quality of the character models and textures. I guess that must have come from playing too much Skyrim. After a while I decided that the graphics look pretty good in-game after, especially when the characters are in motion and when seen on the gorgeous stages. Static models still look unimpressive though.

• One of the most pleasant surprises about this game is how long the Story Mode is. It amounts to a reboot of the whole story, prompted by Raiden, on the verge of defeat, sending back memories of the events in all of the previous Mortal Kombat games to his past self who then tries to fix his mistakes. Unfortunately, the memories seem pretty jumbled and history has a tendency to repeat itself so iconic events happen again. All this is told from the perspective of various different characters that you take control over the course of the story. You don’t have a choice in the matter here since the story is fixed. In between the fight sequences are CGI sequences of very generous length to fill out the story. It really does amount to another Mortal Kombat movie!

• Unfortunately the CGI sequences are of rather poor quality. They basically look like they were heavily compressed, perhaps for console compatibility purposes? The in-game graphics look much better than the CGI. Another downside is that they’re not skippable. It’s annoying to come back to the story mode after shutting the game because it autosaves after every fight. Since the CGI after each fight can be quite long, rewatching scenes you’ve already seen can get annoying. And the story is long enough that most players will not be completing it in one or two sessions. Still, it’s very entertaining and is easily the best realized story effort I’ve seen in any fighting game.
• This edition of the game includes some 30+ characters, including four that were DLC characters in the console version. That’s not as many as in some previous iterations of the game, but it’s plenty for most people. Gameplay-wise, instead of low and high attacks, you now have a button for each limb for four buttons in total. Blocking still uses a button of its own, which is why I’ve never been any good at blocking in this franchise but the run button is now gone. Combos are supposedly more free-form now but it still feels hard-coded to me. Fatalities are back in and a new feature are x-ray attacks, which amount to super attacks which eat up all three sections of the special bar.

• Other than the story mode, there are quite a bit of extra stuff. In addition to the standard arcade ladder, there’s a tag-team ladder which are two-on-two fights with of course special mechanics to switch out characters or have characters combine to pull off special attacks. There’s also a Challenge Tower which throws all sorts of random challenges at you. This could be beating an enemy with only one specific attack, fighting an enemy who can only be damaged while standing in the light and all sorts of unique stuff. There is an extensive tutorial and a highly configurable practice mode. Finally, there is a huge system to unlock all manner of collectibles with in-game koins. In short, you can spend a lot of time in this game if you really want to.
• I realized while playing this that while this game has a significantly larger selection of characters than, say, Street Fighter IV, many of the characters actually end up feeling rather homogeneous. One reason is that except for the boss characters, they’re all of roughly the same size. The other is that all characters basically share some basic attacks, for example the uppercut and the leg sweep. After realizing this, I ended up appreciating the character designs of Street Fighter IV more. I also found myself being disgusted by the costume designs for the female characters. The designers were so intent on having the female characters show as much skin as possible that there is barely any room left to differentiate between their costumes. I sure don’t recall Street Fighter IV having this problem.

• As for gameplay, while I acknowledge that the special moves are all arranged in such a way as to be easy to pull off, I found myself having trouble with them on my Xbox 360 controller. Part of it must be due to the controller’s famously bad d-pad, but I also feel that the designers opted for a strict evaluation of input. On the other hand, the x-ray move is ridiculously easy to pull off and it’s the same for every character. It can also take off more than half of the enemy’s life, depending on which character’s x-ray move is being used. This seems like an odd design choice to me.
• The cheatiness of the bosses is probably part and parcel of this franchise but damn is Shao Kahn unbelievably cheap here. He is beatable sure, but only if you keep exploiting his taunts and spam your own cheapest attack on him over and over again. It makes for a boss that feels strong I guess, but it’s not really a fun fight.

Despite these gripes however, I still found this to be a solid, thoroughly entertaining game. It’s fun to pull off and watch the special moves and fatalities. The story is overwrought stuff but fun enough to watch through once. And there the Challenge Towers offers what amounts to a variety of mini-games if you’re so inclined. It’s just its design doesn’t feel very refined and I don’t think the characters are very well balanced. But then I’m not a good judge of that. I think it’s a decent fighting game that is definitely worth the money but it’s probably not something you’ll keep around for a long time.