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Warning: Spoilers
It is a bad game, top to bottom.
Story: The story would've been more coherent and consistent if it was written at a toddlers daycare group.
The game opens with shinnok telling raiden that elder gods "cannot" be killed, yet an entire plot point is that cetrion kills the other elder gods to complete her betrayal and help kronika.
Kronika has the power over time itself, as we see she can reverse time, resurrect the dead, freely move people and even entire locations to different points in time at her whim yet for some reason she doesnt revive shinnok after raiden beheads him, nor does she bring shinnok from a point in time before his beheading to help her, she could technically do both of these and have 2 shinnoks, but instead there isnt even one playing a role in this game because reasons.
Within the first hour of the game we have a scene where kronika messes up time, moving characters throughout time to help her yet for some reason she also moves the "good" guys who will inevitably fight against her, no reason is ever given for this and it isnt even mentioned but an all powerful being with free control over time decides to bring her own worst enemies in their peak conditions to the perfect point in time to stop her.
On top of that when the time merger happens current raiden is wiped from existence, proving that kronika has the power to remove raiden from the timeline, yet the next 3+ hours of the "story" revolve around kronika convincing other villians to work with her because all of a sudden she needs their help to summon the "immense power" to remove raiden from the timeline, despite already having done so single handedly once before.
Later in the story we learn that it is not the first time kronika has reset time, that she has pulled off this exact same plan countless times before, which opens up about a million questions, a few of the most obvious ones.
Why has she never before created a timeline without raiden? Why keep resetting the board only to put the exact same pieces in the exact same place that will inevitably interfer with her plans?
Why did she not simply stop Liu Kang from being born? It is Liu Kang combined with Raiden that poses her biggest threat yet after spending eons watching different timelines unfold it didnt once occur to her that simply stopping the birth of one human who is a consistent thorn in her side would allow her to do as she pleases?
If she has gone through with that plan countless times before how is she still so bad at controlling her power that as mentioned above she brings her own enemies to the exact point in time to allow them to stop her plans?
If she has experienced countless timelines how is she still caught off guard by the actions of the "good" guys?
If she has experienced countless timelines how is she surprised when her characters lose? And how is she compeltely unprepared with no contingencies or backups?
It's just horrendous, there are more plotholes than plot, things happen with no rhyme or reason, nothing is ever explained, nothing adds up and Kronika who is now the most powerful named being in the entire MK lore is so painfully stupid that a comatose chipmunk could do a better job than her.
Gameplay: The gameplay is awful, not in the way you might think, in simplest terms it is the singular most poorly balanced fighting game ever created. I know its a substantial task to create a fighting game roster where the characters are individual but equal but NRS didnt even try here, nobody can honestly say that NRS put any effort whatsoever in. I will use a few characters for examples
The following characters are so broken that using them is one tiny step away from running cheat engine Liu kang- easiest inputs in the game, highest damage output in the game, moves literally ignore the "frame data" that the tutorials tell you are "essential" to understand, fastest animations in the game, has skills that make him dangerous at any range
Noob saibot- easy inputs, insanely high damage, every single attack in his entire moveset is safe ( meaning nothing puts him at a frame disadavantage), has skills that make him dangerous at any range.
Scorpion- easy inputs, high damage, fast animations, safe on everything, good mix ups, dangerous at any range.
Scrub zero- easy inputs, high damage, more mix ups than the entire remaining roster combined, safe on everything.
In contract these characters are so broken that using them is playing with a severe handicap
Skarlet - slowest attacks in the game, minimal damage, only 1 combo, special skills are tailored for zoning but they are terrible at zoning, zero mix ups
Rain - slow attacks, minimal damage, only 2 potential combos which also have the most difficult and frame perfect inputs in the entire game, no mix ups, doesnt have a single overhead attack meaning someone can duck block and be immune to rains entire move list, one of the only characters who canonically has always been able to teleport for some reason has no teleport skill whereas Liu kang has 3, 3! Different teleports.
Mileena- slow attacks, no damage, no combos, no mix ups, almost entirely useless special moves.
It is ridiculous, you could pick Liu, Noob or Scorpion, put your controller on the floor, shine a laser pointer on it so that your cat/dog paws at the controller and they would beat the remaining 34 characters in the roster 9/10 times, that is how overpowered the top 3 are and how pitiful the rest are in comparison.
A rain player could spend time practicing the most awkard inputs in the game, they could land a 25 hit combo chaining together 4 combos + 3 special attacks and burn through both bars of meter to amplify them and the result is a pathetic 21% damage. In contrast a Liu kang player can press X/Y/A or Square/Triangle/X and that "combo" will deal over 40%
Another comparison, a skarlet player can be a technically good player. They can know the frame data, know the timing, have all the techniques down perfectly but it is utterly meaningless because every single move in Liu,Noob and Scorpions move lists are faster than every single move in Skarlets. So it doesnt matter how good you may be or how well you know the game and the characters, if you are against a character who has such a colossal advantage that they can literally mash any button and their character will be able to out-manouever and/or interrupt your characters animations what are you supposed to do?
One more quick comparison Mileena not only has slow start up animations but also slow recovery frames, in contrast the top 3 have no disadvantageous moves, not one. With mileena a single miss, a single hit is blocked and you are going to take damage, there is no way around it. Even if you play carefully and try to counter your opponent it still wont matter because she is so slow that it is unavoidable that she will be out performed by the opposing character and take hits. Whereas the top 3 can do whatever they want and there is no way to punish them, they can mash or spam, they can use an attack just because they think it looks cool and it is 100% irrelevant, doesn't matter if they miss or their attack is blocked, those characters recover so fast while stunning and/or knocking back other characters leaving the top 3 completely safe regardless of the situation.
Icing on the cake in all of the above mentioned scenarios not only are you playing with a severe and blatant handicap but in addition to that you have to land roughly 5x the amount of hits as your opponent because of how low the damge output for the bottom characters is. A liu kang can do the 1/2/3 combo 3 times and that will take the entire health bar from any character. Rain, Mileena and Skarlet meanwhile will have to land dozens upon dozens upon dozens of attacks just to take 30%
"Matching": For some reason NRS in their infinite "wisdom" decided to include win/loss ratios and predicted odds in "kasual" matchmaking. A "feature" that benefits nobody and makes the experience immeasurably worse because it makes the process of trying to find a match take about 10x times longer than it should. Unless you are getting paid nobody should care about wins/losses in a video game full stop, but who on earth cares about a ratio in "kasual"? A game mode where there are no rewards, no risks, no rank, no ladder, yet evidently there are enough fragile people who play this game who will sit through a matching period only to leave because the game didnt give them a predictive 100% win chance.
The Krypt: How a game developer that has been around for decades thought it was a good idea to force players to have to spend hours running back and forth across a small, unchanging, empty map opening the same chests thousands of times to unlock things is beyond comprehension.
The Towers: Similar to the above, a game mode that forces players to fight the same characters thousands of times, but also has pss poor "modifiers" that do moronic things like have a lazer panning the screen that takes your health in under 3 second. How they thought putting 2 remarkably tedious grinds in this game was a "good" system defies any semblance of logic.
Customisation: 1:Cusomisation doesnt exist, game lists for example 20/80 skins unlocked, in reality there are 4 skins and the rest are identical but have barely noticable colour changes, 1 will have a blue collar, the next royal blue.
2:The only skins that are different were only available if you pre-ordered specific versions of the game, in specific time windows, from specific shops, in specific parts of the world, making them innaccessible to 99.9% of players
I am out of space and I havent even touched on crashes, endless server problems or constant settings resetting and requiring you to run benchmarks everytime you want to play. This review doesnt even dent the list of flaws, all of which could and should've been avoided if they cared enough to do any balance or play testing or bug shooting whatsoever.
1/10
