Mortal Kombat 1 is a reboot of the arguably most iconic fighting game series ever made. The game is a classic fighting game: The stages and characters are 3D, but the fights take place on classic 2D-stages with defined borders. The game features multiple single-player and multiplayer modes.

Same as in its predecessor Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat 1 serves the player with a roughly five-hour story mode combining cinematic cutscenes with defined battles for multiple characters. What starts as the usual story around a mortal combat tournament between the earth and the outer word becomes fast a broader scoped story about power and intrigues. The strong part of the story is surely the presentation: Cutscenes and animations, music, sound-effects, and the voice cast are excellent and make it a real movie theatre experience. Worth to mention also how the fights are fluently embedded into the story as the cutscenes smoothly go over into the stage fights. In addition, the story mode is the best way to get to learn all the characters and therefore it’s surely the first thing to play.

Towers are very similar as in previous Mortal Kombat games as you fight a row of enemies climbing up a tower. There are multiple towers with different difficulties and number of fights required to be completed to reach the top. Same as in the story mode the difficulty can also be adjusted by a global setting in addition, however on medium difficulty the game appeared already a bit to easy to me. Successfully completing a tower with one of the characters will give you more background on his destiny after the events of the story mode. To avoid spoilers, you should play tower mode after completing the story.

The new invasion mode is a seasons-based mode with some analogies to Super Smash Bros Ultimate. You move your character on a map from node to node. Behind each node a certain challenge needs to be passed. Usually this is a standard fight but there are special events like fighting a higher number of enemies in a row, survival challenges in which you must jump and dodge avoiding being hit by projectiles, or the “Test-Your-Might” button mashing challenges. In this mode you can change your character at any time. Characters can be leveled up on individual skills. Merchants and a blacksmith will sell you useful items or upgrade amulets which give you permanent and temporary bonus effects. In each map of invasion there is also a boss fight to be won at the end required to proceed to the next map. Unfortunately, the boss fights are just like the normal fights with some additional health bars or special effects for the enemy. Other than that, these encounters are not special in terms of presentation or enemy characters used. The invasion mode is planned to be updated with new seasons and is a good choice for some casual gaming sessions. After finishing most parts of the first season however I already started losing interest as moving over the map fight-by-fight becomes repetitive. Surely the developers tried to put a variety and complexity into this mode making it motivating long term. Features like hidden fights, ambush fights, upgrades of artifacts, seasonal towers etc. surely are interesting for the first encounters and play sessions but as I am anyway not a big fan of service games it was not enough to motivate a lot to play further beyond some small casual play sessions.

Multiplayer modes range from friendly and ranked fights. There is also a special mode in which contenders take turn to fight against a current raining king. The rest of the group can watch the current fight until it is their turn to be the contender. Both modes worked well most of the time but suffered from stuttering and lags occasionally due to bad connection of one of the players.