Game Reviews

Mortal Kombat X

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| Mortal Kombat X
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Mortal Kombat X
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| Mortal Kombat X

After about ten minutes of Mortal Kombat X I'm already a bit bored. It looks nice, and there's a decent slosh of gore, but it's all pretty flat.

There's just something lacking here, and everything feels simpler than it should. The mobile brawler might be a genre based around screen mashing, but Mortal Kombat X somehow manages to make it even more shallow.

Babality

You have a team of three pugilists, and you need to battle it out against a series of other scrappers. I have to admit I'm not a Mortal Kombat fan, but I'm pretty sure a good chunk of the characters you're brawling with and against to begin with are just nameless goons.

To fight you tap the screen. After a while a swipe command flashes up and you've got an age to input it and finish off a combo string. Then there are special moves that power up as you fight, and ally characters you can use to unleash powerful attacks.

Pushing two fingers on the screen blocks, but you probably won't do very much of that, because it'll eat into your important screen-mashing time.

The famous fatalaties don't make that much of an appearance here. After two or three hours of play I'd performed two, one of which involved a laser drone, and the other which saw me cutting the face off a foe and exposing his flobbly brain.

I've got Johnny Cage and Scorpion in my roster at the moment, and some other characters that I'm drawing a blank on. Everyone plays in the same way though, albeit with slightly tweaked combos and special moves.

Finish it

Mortal Kombat X is a little too brainless for its own good. There isn't even the slightest hint of strategy, and while the energy system isn't too egregious, the whole thing is a slog of the grandest proportions.

There's still something vaguely moreish about it though, and it has some nice ideas. It's just a shame there's not a lot more meat to pull off all those shattered bones.

Mortal Kombat X

An awfully simple screen masher, Mortal Kombat X looks the part, but it's all a bit flat
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.