Mortal Kombat for iOS review

Honestly, this is a near flawless victory for mobile gamers. The gameplay is smooth. The controls are intuitive and the graphics are absolutely amazing. It is raw, intensive, graphic, violent. Absolutely perfect for a multiplayer fighting game on a mobile platform. It has some Role Playing dynamics I wasn't expecting. It's obviously not quite the same as playing on a console. So if you're expecting the same gameplay you will be disappointed. That'd be like expecting Fallout Shelter to be just like Fallout 3. The farming of resources can get a bit tedious but when they give you the game for free, they have to make their money somewhere. So either deal with the farming or pay for koins/souls.

Like Guitar Hero, Pokemon, or Grand Theft Auto, you don’t have to consider yourself a gamer to know about the Mortal Kombat franchise. It’s flowed over into movies, multiple web series, and nearly every anti-video game argument made in the past two decades. Mortal Kombat is a staple of the video game industry, and now, for the first time ever, a new entry in the franchise is debuting on mobile devices before it’s released on consoles.

All of the fighting in the game is done through touchscreen taps and slashes. Tap to punch, spam tap to spam punches, two finger-touch to block, and slash occasionally for a quick-time-event power move.

So with that said, gone are the attack-chain combos that are a hallmark of the franchise, and while fatalities are present in Mortal Kombat X, they are few and far between. In fact they only seem to be present as rewards for fighting the game’s bosses, which are sprinkled in between dozens of other less challenging opponents. Fatalities are simply activated with a gesture rather than a complex combination that requires a bit of memorization, which really eliminates the feeling of mastery that always comes with successfully pulling off a fatality in a typical Mortal Kombat game.

Though the fatalities are much easier to successfully initiate, they are just as gory and gruesome as ever.

The gameplay flows smoothly while the characters are whipping around the screen landing punches, spitting acid, and getting their bodies broken apart. While each fighter handles the same, their unique special abilities and attack movements help to spice things up. It’s also relatively easy to unlock new fighters too. With the currency I was given just for successfully playing the game in its first day, I had enough to purchase a second entire team (which has its own separate cooldowns) with a couple of fighters left over.

Mortal Kombat X is a free-to-play game that utilizes the standard energy system. What is nice about Mortal Kombat X is that if you make two teams of (three) fighters, each full team runs on their own energy. So if you play for awhile with Team 1 and burn through their energy, you can switch over and play with Team 2 for awhile. With that said, you can refuel an entire team’s worth of energy with nine souls (the in-game currency). Unless you spend all of your souls on unlocking a fighter, which I did not, you will have plenty to use to refuel your fighters to keep the gameplay going.

9/10