The best dance track from the 90’s looks to make a comeback in game form.
Brutal is a word often overused to describe games these days. It’s gone from buzz word to cliche in a few short years, but often any game that boast that claim can have its violence traced back to the series that started it all, Mortal Kombat. By now we’ve seen all the blood soaked fatality videos and bone crushing trailer for MK X, what you might not know is just how extensive the game has the possibility of becoming when it’s released next year.
The E3 demo build we got our hands on had six playable characters, only two of which were returning combatants. The four new characters consisted of D’Vorah, Kotal Kahn, Ferra, and Cassie Cage (daughter of Sonya and Johnny Cage). In the MK timeline Mortal Kombat X takes place 25 years after part nine. As we said the game is loaded with possibility and what we saw was just the tip of the iceberg. Every character has three distinct fighting styles to choose from that can alter a fight in different ways. For example D’vorah can choose between adding poison effects to her attacks, controlling bugs, or using her Superior Spider-Man like arms. Some of the characters have twist of their own outside of this. The hulking Ferra, for instance, fights with his partner Torr riding piggy back. He can utilize her for team-up attacks, or choose a style that doesn’t include her in exchange for a stronger ground game.
Mortal Kombat also wins the award for the most fluid entry in the series. In game animations run so smooth you have a hard time differentiating what’s out of your control. Netherrealm really borrows from what they did on Injustice and expands on it by the power of X. Environment interactions have more depth than just pre made statue destructions, it feels like you’re fighting on a multiplayer map more than a 2-D picture.
On the PS3 era hardware, limitations made a developer choose between size of the content and how good a game could look. In this next-gen PS4, Xbox One era it seems like MKX will strive to take full advantage of the hardware by not only giving you an expansive game that looks to be one of the prettiest fighting games ever.
Oh did we mention the fatalities, oh the fatalities. In the demo we were able to execute Scorpion’s antacid relief. He shoots a fireball through his opponent’s midsection leaving a gaping hole that shows us the heart drop to where the stomach would have been. He follows this up by vertically slicing off the character’s frontal lobe. The win screen is his opponent on the floor cut in two with half a tongue making an eerie post death noise. Wrap your heads around that.
Mortal Kombat X will be released to parents nightmares in 2015. We’ll definitely talk more about about the game as it nears release.