Karnage with friends
Two more months. Just two more months.
That’s what I have to keep telling myself while agonizing over the release of Mortal Kombat X. As someone who logged nearly 7,000 matches into the last Mortal Kombat, and still plays Injustice from time to time, any new info is good news, and NetherRealm has recently dropped a lot of details on the game’s online modes.
Let’s dig in.
Mortal Kombat X (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3)
Developer: NetherRealm Studios, Showtime Studios
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Release Date: April 14, 2015
If you spent any significant amount of time with Mortal Kombat 9, you remember the Challenge Tower. Consisting of 300 challenges, the tower would test and frustrate you to wits’ end as you worked your way up to the top. Mortal Kombat X‘s Living Towers fill a similar role with key differences.
The biggest changes are that the towers are now split in three, and the challenges in each will update with new content. To start, you have your quick tower comprising of only five challenges, but it updates every two to three hours. The daily tower carries an intermediate level of difficulty, and updates its eight fights every 24 hours. For those more than confident in their fighting mastery there is the premier tower, built with long-form challenges and events in mind that will run for a few days or even a week, depending on how special the event is.
Unlike the Challenge Tower, the Living Towers don’t determine which character you can fight with. So if you’re like me and only learn about four fighters, you won’t find yourself awkwardly trying to learn characters on the fly as everything moves at double speed and the bombs come raining from the sky. That’s another major difference — Living Towers consist entirely of regular fights with various modifiers. Where Injustice‘s S.T.A.R. Labs and Mortal Kombat‘s Challenge Tower had silly stages where you’d break into a museum as a cat, or shoot a horde of zombies, these stages have none of that. A change for the better if you ask me. My biggest knock against S.T.A.R. Labs was how often the mission would turn out to be awkward platforming sections or some other distraction from the core fighting.
More noteworthy still is Mortal Kombat X‘s Faction Wars, a macro-level approach to traditional online clans. When you first boot up your copy, you are going to be prompted to join one of five factions, all based on series lore: Lin Kuei, White Lotus, Black Dragon, Special Forces, or the Brotherhood of Shadows. Once you choose a faction, it really tries to become your game’s identity. Menus, interfaces, and even loading screens, will become themed after your faction. So Lin Kuei members may get scenic snowy forests for a main menu, while the Brotherhood of Shadow loading screens will greet you with images of the fire and brimstone Netherrealm.
From there, everything you do in both multiplayer and single-player will give you faction points, which feed into your faction’s total score. You can clear sections of Living Towers, complete faction-specific challenges, or even face rival factions in online battles. Again, all of this feeds into the collective faction war effort, as well as your individual faction progress.
The faction war is platform agnostic as well, so fellow White Lotus accomplishments in the PlayStation 4 version will feed the White Lotus on PC and Xbox 360. The winner at the end of each week-long faction war will be rewarded with anything from profile icons to faction-specific finishers. And if you are the type to swap sides, just know you will not be able to bandwagon to the winning faction. Once a war starts, you are locked into your group, and switching after a war means losing all of your current faction rewards and progress.
Of course, what’s a fighting game without great fighters, and fight I did. Ermac and Reptile were not available in this build of the game, but all other announced characters were. That did not seem to matter though, as I spent nearly all of my time playing with the Buzz Saw variant of Kung Lao. For those unaware, every fighter has three variations to choose from, each variant adding its own moves to a characters base moveset. Buzz Saw is far and away my favorite. This is the rush-down, in-your-face Kung Lao that you either loved or hated in Mortal Kombat.
While Buzz Saw is more focused on projectiles with the classic hat throw and ground hat, it’s not in the interest of zoning. Both the ground hat and regular hat tosses are slow, much slower in fact, than in Mortal Kombat 9. The real fun here is to throw out the hat and close the distance.
A basic example of this would be to toss it, which does a great deal of stun as your opponent is trapped in an animation of getting buzz-sawed in the chest, and close the distance with a dive kick. Basic I know, but even in my limited time, I honestly felt like Buzz Saw will be the variation of choice for those who previously enjoyed Kung Lao’s breakneck pace. Of course you could also try out his Hat Trick variant, which focuses on controlling the hat as an independent entity, or Tempest, which emphasizes control and spacing with his signature spin.
While I still have lingering questions about Mortal Kombat X, what’s been shown so far has been great. Living Towers’ direct approach to challenges is good fun, and the Faction Wars (all hail White Lotus!) is something I already know will turn into a time sink for me. The last taste before launch has been a good one. Now I just need to hold out for two more months for the real meal.
