Mortal Kombat 11 Test: Excellent gameplay, packaged excessively

L & # 39; original Deadly fight The arcade experience has literally shaped my life in the game. Since then, I have been a dedicated member of the fighting game community. Looking back, the original trilogy of games seems special, and the hype of the first year for Mortal Kombat 11 recently stoked a part of this nostalgia. After long ignoring the releases of the franchise, I was really looking forward to trying a new Deadly fight Thu.

As a serious fighting player, I am good enough to know that I am not particularly good. The fighting games are a deep rabbit hole, and there is always more to dig. I am registered to participate in the month of August Street Fighter V and the new (and always new) Samurai Shodown at Evo, the annual global fighting games event in Vegas. I run a weekly night hosting players for a multitude of fighting games (but especially street fighter securities). Regardless of the preferred title, however, I'm happy to get started and talk about frame traps or fighting game theory.

I'm a fan of Mortel Kombat series in general, but I stopped paying a lot of attention after the third arcade title in the mid-90s. So before playing MK11, I caught up on some abstracts from the story of the relaunched franchise that came with NetherRealm Studios (NRS) Mortal Kombat 9 in 2011. My point of view on the game is perhaps that of an incessant fan these days, but these first titles will always occupy a special place.

With all this apart, I will say that Mortal Kombat 11 gives me mixed feelings.

Visual feast

For starters, the game is beautiful. NRS uses a highly modified version of Unreal Engine 3 and, whatever the studio did, the game outshines Unreal Engine 4 fighters as Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V in graphic fidelity. Everything from character models to scenes to lighting and effects ends with a big budget varnish. The blood and viscera (we'll get there!) Have never been so bright and fluid.

The sets could be my favorite part. There is a wide variety of locations, ranging from a ship sailing in a bloody sea to a military base in the desert with a cactus on which you can rub your opponent's face, up to a back to the original. Deadly fight Tournament stage with the audience of Shaolin monks in the orange dress – except that this time, they are silent corpses and not a sea of ​​moving heads.

Deadly fight has always been a series focusing on the atmosphere, and this is perhaps the strongest atmosphere to date. Smoke and dust swirl in the backgrounds, candles glow softly and intractable elements (like the aforementioned cactus) give each scene a little more personality.

The character design is also excellent, with a varied mix of visual and game styles. The majority of actors are old favorites, such as Scorpion, Sub Zero and Raiden, but there are some newer characters from the time of NRS, such as Skarlet and Cassie Cage, endowed with blood magic, and daughter of Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade (her parents are also in the game). Yeah, the game is old enough for the original characters to connect to have kids. There are also a handful of interesting newcomers, like Geras, who knows how to handle time, or the six-armed Kollector, who has so many limbs that he dedicates two just to hold his backpack.

L & # 39; original MK the games were made with digitized actors to create all the poses, creating a much more "realistic" style at the time compared to the more cartoon style street fighter. Now, NRS uses 3D models, but it continues to make extensive use of motion capture to animate them and serve as a link to the technology behind the series. This has been a mixed success over previous titles, which have been rightly criticized for some strange poses and choices. MK11 is much improved in this department, but it still retains a sense of stiffness that goes back to the original games. It looks like it's a stylistic choice at 80% but a bad animation quite old at 20%. This is an improvement over past games like Mortal Kombat X and Injustice 2however, where the ratio was maybe 50/50, to be nice.

Overall, even considering the occasional choice of carefree animation, MK11 is easily the best "realistic" 3D hunter on the market. Games like Dragon Ball Fighterz or Guilty equipment, which are rendered in 3D, but with cel shading techniques, are distinguished by their style, but if you are looking for finely rendered skeletons of half-armed, half-armed four-armed dragons (RIP Goro), NRS is at the top stack .

Fatal hits

All this graphic fidelity leads us, of course, to the most famous thing in the series: excessive gore and violence. Deadly fight has always been a fantastic series for teenagers – with undead ninja assassins, Shaolin monks, femme fatales and blazing gods – but it's the fatalities that really put it on the map. You can tear off someone 's head after you have conquered, and then hold it in the air while the spine hangs underneath. It was a little exaggerated, but the graphics were realistic for their time.

MK11 Turns the blood up to 11 and makes the most of the graphics engine. You want to tear someone's face, open their skull and bang their brain on the tingling of the arm so that you can take a big juicy mouthful while the blood is running in slow motion and you catch for the camera ? NRS has you covered. How about throwing up a torrent of insects into your victim's mouth so that it can writh from pain before turning into a mass of legs, the corpse now being worn like a bernard shell -l & # 39; hermit? No problem!

The head of the story, who manipulates the time, repeatedly tears in two or erases the skin of your body, and then reverses the time needed to remake it. If you can find a way to tear someone up, there is a good chance that the game will cover you.

Violence and sadism are excessive, but that is why the series is known. Each character has two deaths too involved, as well as an assortment of shorter kill animations called brutalities. From the latter, my personal favorite so far crushes your opponent under a fall Deadly fight Arcade Cabinet in a nice series. It's disgusting but mostly fun, definitely part of the Deadly fight package.

With MK11, I have two real complaints about the lack of restraint shown by the game's tendency to go too far. The first and biggest problem is a new mechanic for the series, called Fatal Blow.

A fatal blow is a blow that you can make once a match is available when your character falls below 30% health. It is a return mechanism, intended to give the losing player a chance to fight back. I'm not a fan of things that reward people for losses, but to make it work only once a game means that there is a strategy to adopt when you use it, at the same time. less.

The problem is that the animation triggered by a fatal blow is so long. The name is misnomer: it's not a hit, it's a whole series of them. Johnny Cage, for example, begins with his bright green kick, straight to the chin, the slow-motion blood escaping from his opponent's mouth. Then come a few kicks and rollovers, this time hitting the victim on the ground, his boot to the head, more blood in slow motion escaping. It's not finished, though; now, he takes out his trophy in the likeness of an Oscar, holds it in the air so that the light shines above him, before bending down to break it on the opposite face. same c & # 39; not enough, while Cage finally jumps back, grabs the trophy and stabs it into his enemy's chest, with, you guessed it, more idle blood flying everywhere.

All this takes 12 seconds to complete. This might not sound like much, but keep in mind that this is an essential gaming mechanism, you are likely to see every game (sometimes twice a game). These slow animations add up quickly when repeated ad nauseam.

Fatalities are optional and occur only after the end of the match. Between multiple fatalities and brutalities, there is also a decent amount of variety. Fatal Shocks, on the other hand, are an essential mechanism that follows the same long sequence each time. They age very quickly, there is no way to ignore them, and they arrive mid-game, really killing the course of action. I found myself avoiding to use my Fatal Blow against the CPU during fights while I was convinced I did not need it to win, simply because I did not feel like it anymore. watch the animation again.

If the fatal Blasts of about 12 seconds had been divided into six individual two-second options, randomly selected each time, it would have seemed much more satisfying and more lively. In the current state of things, this is my least favorite aspect of the gameplay.

The other place where the lack of restraint is shown is an ironic result of the care and depth that NRS put into his characters. The long and generally well designed story mode offers a lot of chances to create real personalities and to make each of the protagonists feel. They treat loss, sadness and family in a reliable way.

And that makes it even more shocking when they are sadistically torturing themselves.

The beginning of the story is a battle scene between Cassie and her mother, Sonya, presented as a right-of-way for Cassie's military promotion. It works like a good excuse for a fight scene. You can control Cassie, injuring her mother a bit. Wait, huh? Cassie, why are you recovering this power tool? Damn shit, you just stuck it in your mom's head and started digging his brain, the blood is flowing everywhere. I thought it was a friendly fight? It's messed up, my daughter.

At one point in history, a character takes a bullet in the leg. He can not fight anymore; they must help him. It's very dramatic. He was also the guy who was half helpless earlier, with points stuck in his head, bullets bouncing off coins and eyes, and torn in general. The disconnect between the blood, whether it is important or not, is a bit funny, but it also eliminates much of the tension in the story.

Even outside of history, things get weird MK11 with the story mode. You can not do fatalities in story fights, against family members or otherwise. But in a normal match? It may sound like a fight in a game so steeped in violence, but it's a bit odd to see Cassie bump into her father's chest, sending her heart flying, then land behind the gaping wound to form a heart with his hands. and send a kiss to the camera.

Deadly fight and excessive violence had gone hand in hand since the beginning. But MK11 may feel like you're trying too hard, with animations starting to feel trapped and forced. More respect for the viewer's time would have been good. Finish a game with a long fatal blow, then receive the invitation to execute the fatality right after can give the impression that Simpsons even: "Stop, stop! He's already dead!"