Gadgetory

the Mortal Kombat series has known its ups and downs but originally started with a classic trio of arcade games was followed by five core games and a number of spin-offs that are either mediocre or complete and utter crap only to be redeemed with a new peak with Mortal Kombat 2011 which leads the question can NetherRealm Studios keep up this momentum with Mortal Kombat X what's up Internet Kevin here now I know just simply looking at gameplay from Mortal Kombat X probably makes you think that it's just morn the same as Mortal Kombat 9 but that's really not the case there have been a lot of changes here a lot of things have been added and a lot of things have been dropped and the question is whether or not those changes were for the better starting with the core gameplay now while Mortal Kombat X does have its additional new features the core gameplay itself at least while you're in the middle of a fight is pretty similar to Mortal Kombat 9 there's really only two huge changes worth noting first off while the game does still have your special meter for IX tax combo breakers and of course those always satisfying extra attacks you also now have a stamina meter which allows you to break out into a full force run to close distances very quickly but only for a short period of time second the game also has added interactable objects from injustice enabling you to interact with the background like picking up crates and throwing at enemies which is a great addition because it makes each stage a lot more interesting beyond just simply being a backdrop so at first glance Mortal Kombat X just looks like Mortal Kombat 9 with some new features added from injustice but what really makes this one different and interesting is what they added right before the match and how you can finish it specifically variant fighting styles and brutalities the way variant fighting styles works is that while the roster only consists of 24 or 25 characters of your period or in grabbed Goro each of them actually is three different fighting styles to choose from now they all shared the same kind of core you have the same kind of combo attacks and certain special attacks but with each fighting style you'll also get additional unique special attacks some of your abilities will have different properties or you might actually have very few special attacks but in exchange get larger more powerful regular attack combos now there's two things that really make me love this change first off each character has different play styles so if there's a character you really like in concept but you don't like the first fighting style you pick well there's two more to try but the bigger thing is the fact since there's so much more room for each character to be different and interesting nether room actually took a little more of a chance in this and made a lot more interesting unique mechanics that we haven't seen in this game before for instance some characters have special aura abilities where you set up a little thing on the ground and while you stand on it you have special advantages or other characters have temporary benefits like you can enchant your fists to be on fire for a little while or there are stance change abilities it's things like this that really make each character come a lot more to life and stand out as being just a bit more unique especially when there's three different versions of them to play as now as for brutality's that's a term that's come up in the series before but they work a little differently this time now the game still has traditional fatalities which are some of the goriest and most ridiculous ones in the series ever if you haven't seen my top 10 favorite ones yet and go check it out because some of them are absolutely ridiculous but in addition to using those there's also now brutalities which are not as over-the-top gory but they're a lot faster and what's really great about them is that it's a built-in way to taunt opponents the way it works is that a brutality happens when you finish off the opponent using a very specific move and also meeting a number of other prerequisites like throwing them so many times or using so many interactable objects so as a result it's not only a cool way to finish someone off and give a little more variety to fatalities but it's also a great way to in-game taunts someone because you made sure to finish them off with a specific move and they couldn't stop you from doing it now if you watched my 5 things you should know about Mortal Kombat X video brutalities and variant fighting styles were - the things I was excited for and the third thing was the story mode because this is something that we've seen in both injustice and Mortal Kombat 9 that not a lot of other fighting games really do you know most traditional fighting games just have you do an arcade mode where you fight eight guys back-to-back fight a boss and then get a quick little epilogue scene but in Mortal Kombat X there's actually a full-blown story mode where you have 12 chapters playing as different characters and it basically plays out like a full movie now to be perfectly honest I did like the story mode in Mortal Kombat 9 better I think it was more well written but X's is still really solid my only real complaint about it is that I feel like it was a bit of a missed opportunity when it came to fleshing out some of the game's new characters there are eight new characters in Mortal Kombat X and out of those six them got pretty well fleshed out in the story mode but two of them were pretty much left in the dust specifically ferret or and Aaron black now to be fair fair tor is kind of a two-dimensional character to begin with all you really need to know is that it's Master Blaster on steroids but for Aaron black it was really disappointing because all he ever really comes across is that one Lackey of Kotal Kahn that uses a gun so when he's introduced in the multiplayer mode as another character you can play as he just ends up feeling really stale and flat compared to everyone else that has a lot more personality traits and background revealed already now story mode is not the only option if you want to do single-player there are of course the traditional towers or you can do things like classic arcade mode survival endless and a test your luck mode where different random modifiers mess with the match on top of that though the game now also has a more interesting option of challenge towers and living towers now challenge towers are really just a form of indirect multiplayer where you score as best as you can on a tower and then your friends have to try and top that score living towers though are an option that gives you a sort of arcade style mode that's constantly fluctuating basically there are three towers that are always being switched out one of them is hourly another one is daily and then there's a premium tower which works on different cycles but one of the big benefits is that it helps preview other content for instance when the game first came out it lets you play as Goro even if you didn't pre-order and other DLC characters are going to be playable through it as well without having to buy them so it gives you a little way to test them out before spending extra money but that still doesn't really solve a problem that I'm gonna bring up later which is how heavy this game emphasizes its DLC now it is worth mentioning the game does have one other kind of single-player mode and that's the Crypt now this is a returning mode from past games where it was basically the way you could unlock different in-game stuff like concept art costumes music so on so forth this time around though they've made it much more of a mini game where you actually have to explore a crypt and solve little simple puzzles and occasionally fend off enemies with QuickTime events it's kind of interesting at first but the novelty wears thin once you solve most of the puzzles which doesn't take that long after which it just gets really annoying because every time you want to spend coins to unlock stuff you just end up having to re-enter the dungeon every time you make any amount of money and navigate your way through this little crypt area on top of that the game also gives the option to just straight-up buy everything in the crypt with real world currency at 20 bucks which once again DLC so as far as single-player modes go there's quite a few options and really overall I think Mortal Kombat X does do one of the better jobs for single-player experiences in a fighting game but of course that's not why most of you are gonna want to buy Mortal Kombat the reason most people buy this game is because they want to beat the crap out of the friends and multiplayer which it also does an excellent job of local multiplayer is fantastic all the variant fighting styles the brutalities all the stuff I mentioned earlier comes together beautifully and there's also alternative modes to give you a little more fun for instance one were you and your opponent can pick different special modifiers that affect yourselves each other or both at the same time and really make things more interesting where things get a little more awkward though is the game's online options starting with the factions so the factions were Mortal Kombat's attempt at having a more interactive and engaging online community the way it works is when you start the game up you join one of five factions and as you play the game you get points your faction and after every so many days and cycles the faction with the most points is reward with coins and other cool stuff the problem with this is looking at who the factions are and the fact that you're not automatically allocated to one faction or another it's pretty easy to tell who is going to consistently win because it's basically sub-zero's faction versus Raiden's versus knose versus Sonya versus Quan Chi and had it been something like Sub Zero versus scorpion I could see some you know more interesting competition going on but when you have Sub Zero up against four other characters that are series classics but aren't as huge it's just really obvious that his faction is going to win which it has so far consistently now a factions aside the other problem with online multiplayer is that as of right now at least input lag is a problem I've had a few matches that go through smoothly but I've had way more that's suffer from a lot of input lag which isn't that surprising for a big-name game that has a very successful launch but it doesn't make it any better knowing that it is something that will hopefully get fixed with time as servers suffer less stress and more patches come out and maybe they upgrade the servers but as of right now online can be a bit of an off-and-on mess it is also worth mentioning that online doesn't consist of just traditional 1v1 multiplayer there's also a couple of the modes to choose from one of my favorites being the team mode where you have groups of three or five players compete against each other and put it into simultaneous matches the team that wins the most matches overall wins the game what's kind of fun about this though is if you finish your match first you can watch the other matches but you're not watching them directly you just get status updates in the form of life bars moving so with zero context you end up finding yourself cheering for your teammates or not understanding why they're getting their asses kicked so badly so yeah lag online is an issue but that is something that can and more than likely will be fixed with time as server traffic lessons and things get upgraded there are a couple other problems I have with this game though that aren't as easily addressed starting with the fact that I just feel like there's a little bit more content that could be here that's missing for instance I really liked the tag-team mode in wall Kombat 9 I realized it wasn't exactly the main attraction but it was a great option for 4 player multiplayer that didn't resort to just classical round-robin matches and having that not come back just feels like a big loss especially because it doesn't really feel like it be that heart of a mode to implement second off I think the cast was just a little too heavily cut I understand the variant fighting styles give a lot more variety to each character and for how many people they cut I think they did an excellent job of choosing who to keep I think all the essentials are here but there's still some big time series veterans that are missing for instance noob saibot and sindell which leads to another issue that there are some characters that show up in the story mode as enemies that are clearly not fully fleshed out characters but they're pretty close and it's kind of surprising they didn't take a little more time to fully add the new game including sindell ring and Tania Tania of course is one of the four DLC characters so she is getting fully added which leads to really my biggest problem with this game how heavy it is on DLC this is something that we've seen before with both injustice and Mortal Kombat 9 and really a lot of other WV based games where before the game even came out we already knew who the four DLC characters were Tania tremor predator and Jason Voorhees and before any of them were even released you can just buy them all in advance in a season pack for 30 bucks as well as a handful of costumes so if you want the real full game you have to spend an extra thirty dollars making it 90 total now this by itself is annoying but there's a whole lot more DLC going in this game you can unlock the entire crypt by spending $20 in real life and the game has easy fatality tokens that you can buy for real money as well in groups of five or thirty so if you have trouble doing inputs or you have kids the game that want to have simpler inputs as well which is an entirely other separate issue you can buy these tokens to where you just have to press two buttons to see cool glory shit happen now to top all that off I think the real cherry on top about everything is that if you look at Series history with MK 9 and injustice six months to a year from now we're going to get a mark Kombat X complete collection where you can get all those DLC characters all those costumes everything together for 60 bucks maybe even as low as 40 so as opposed to just grabbing it right this second with the worse online experience and spending 90 or even more dollars you could just wait a year have a more patched and balanced game smoother online experience and all that content together for cheaper which just makes it really hard for me to justify buying this game right this second you know don't get me wrong I really really like this game I think it's one of the best releases to come out so far this year but spending 90 upwards to a hundred dollars on a right now when there's all those benefits to just waiting for completed collection I don't know why you wouldn't just wait unless you really want to play local multiplayer with some friends which if you guys want chipping together and do it great otherwise just wait and save your money because you're gonna end up enjoying it a lot more downline well that was my review of Mortal Kombat X if you guys enjoyed the video make sure to hit that thumbs up button to let me know as well subscribe if you haven't yet if despite my warnings you just have to get your hands in the game right this second I do have a link posted down below in the description as always guys thank you so much for watching the video I'm Kevin Kenton and I'll see you guys later