Never-ending Brutality
I have never played a game that I’ve wanted to love so badly that seems so set and determined to antagonize me than the PC port of Mortal Kombat X. In the abstract, Mortal Kombat X is a great game. The single player content is second to none in the genre, providing plenty of things to do while moving the series lore forward in a meaningful way.
It combines the hallmark Mortal Kombat dramatic flair with a fighting system competitive players can take seriously. The variation modifiers giving each character three distinct fighting styles is fantastically implemented, not only accommodating more play-styles, but rewarding character loyalists with options in the face of unfavorable match-ups.
That’s the Mortal Kombat X on the PS4 and Xbox One anyway. The one that runs smoothly and can go online and play against real human opponents. I’ve seen occasional glimmers of that game poking out from the darkness of this busted PC port. Mostly though, I’ve borne witness to a haphazard Frankenstein of a once noble creature, shakily lashed together with baling wire, hope, and enormous 15 gig patches.
Mortal Kombat X (PC)
Developer: NetherRealm Studios, High Voltage Software (PC)
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
MSRP: $59.99
Release Date: April 14, 2015
Rig: Intel i7-920 2.70 GHz, 12GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 770 GPU
When I first installed Mortal Kombat X it was unplayable. I don’t mean in some sort of prissy, PC elitist “anything less than 60 FPS burns my eyes” kind of way (although you could make a strong argument that if any genre of game has the right to demand a consistent and high frame rate, it’s competitive fighting games). I mean in the “this game doesn’t work” way. Things went south as soon as I hit the character select screen and the fighters started drawing themselves in one painful frame at a time. Actual fighting was impossible, with the action portrayed like a garish, bloody View-Master reel.
I have a fairly decent gaming PC. My processor is admittedly old, but I have plenty of RAM and a muscular GTX 770 to help it power through. I run plenty of modern multi-platform games with nary a hitch. There is no reason for Mortal Kombat X to perform this badly. My situation is far from uncommon, with mobs of flustered would-be-warriors with top-end gaming rigs complaining they were in the same bind in the Steam discussion pages. After some rooting about in support forums, I altered my settings, manually installed some drivers, and fussed about until I got the game in working — but far from ideal — order.
I managed to get the game running smooth enough to fart around in the practice mode and work on some combos. Even still, certain stages caused noticeable stuttering and after a few minutes the game would start to hitch and falter no matter where I fought. Oddly, when the performance dipped like this I found that performing an X-Ray move (which automatically locks the action to 30 FPS) seemed to jar the game out of it, restoring a smooth 60 FPS after the move finished (for a short while anyway). I’m about as far from a programmer as you can get, but to me this suggests the problem is less to do with system specs and more with how the game is coded. Something just isn’t working right. While being able to unclog the frame rate with an X-Ray was handy during my protracted training sessions, it’s also vaguely frustrating to know that a functional game is trapped somewhere inside of this rickety port job, but only accessible by jumping through hoops.
Of course, the reason I spent so much time in the training mode this weekend is related to the second major problem with the PC port. The entire online component of the game was up on cinder blocks for most of the time I’ve played.
Online Kombat was down for the majority of weekend. Either the game would entirely refuse to access the online component, saying it couldn’t retrieve my stat card (and therefore refused me entry), or it would simply leave me perpetually waiting to “find a match.” Even during the periods where I was able to find regular ranked and player matches (still with large five minute plus waiting times between opponents) other features wouldn’t work.
The room lobby system, useful for finding similarly skilled or geographically local opponents, was up and down all weekend. Mostly down. The Faction War nonsense has been offline since I installed. Not that I thought that aspect of the game was particularly meaningful, but it’s still annoying to have to wait through one more loading screen as the game fails to find the faction server and informs you of such. More annoying still, trying to view the progress of the on-going war effort locked me in an inescapable loading screen. Fun times.
Of the online matches I got to play, lag seemed to be a total crapshoot. Some fights were buttery smooth like me and my opponent were shoulder to shoulder in the arcade. Others started fine but eventually de-synced and broke down. Still others were like wading through molasses from start to finish, becoming a game of chicken to see who would blink first and have the dreaded black mark of a Quitality branded upon their house. When the room feature was active, I managed to find a neighboring Toronto player and stuck through a series of humiliating, but silky, matches against a terrifying Liu Kang who outclassed me in every possible way. I worried I wouldn’t find another decent online match that night and would rather face his burning fists than chance it, a fear that came to pass when he left the room (no doubt in disgust of my pathetic Kotal Kahn).
A succession of smaller quibbles nip at the heels of those catastrophes. Trying to re-configure a control pad or joystick crashes the game (to turn off negative edge I had to pull every USB device out of my computer and go into the menu with the keyboard). Timed features in the Krypt are reportedly not working right. I was mildly irked to notice that the post-character-select animations (Jax slamming his fists together, Cassie snapping her gum and flipping the bird, and so on) are absent in the PC version. I suppose you could say they thought the faster loading times on the PC version would make them obsolete, but the game still drops you to a loading screen before the fight. Why not chew up those few seconds with something to look at? (I realize this is the smallest complaint of all time but this port ripped my heart out of my chest so bear with me.)
Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Both Mortal Kombat 9 and Injustice had troubled ports with similar problems. Distressingly, many of those issues never got sorted out. With a simultaneous day and date PC release for Mortal Kombat X though, you would have hopped they would be ready to go this time. Motal Kombat X deserves better than this slipshod port. I want to believe that NetherRealm and High Voltage Software will do right by its fans and iron these problems out, that this rough first week is an unfortunate debacle. Given its track record though, part of me fears the worst.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this port and will post an update in a few weeks or so to see if the situation improves. As it stands now, I can’t put it any plainer: do not buy this broken port of a great game.
[This review is based on a retail code purchased by the reviewer, a PC review copy was not made available by the developer.]
