First impressions: The ‘Mortal Kombat 1’ beta teases a fully revamped fighting experience

Mortal Kombat 1 — the twelfth installment in NetherRealm’s venerable and bloody fighting game franchise — is just weeks away. The franchise has been on a serious hot streak for years, reinventing itself with Mortal Kombat in 2011, climbing to new heights in 2015’s Mortal Kombat X, and putting a cherry on top with the delightfully devilish Mortal Kombat 11 in 2019.

This weekend they’re conducting a beta to stress test of the online servers and I was lucky enough to get a code. You get access to Sub Zero, Liu Kang, Kitana, Johnny Cage, Li Mei, and Kenshi, together with four ‘Kameo’ characters: Sonya, Jax, Frost, and Kano.

Like most of the fighting game community, I’ve been eyeball deep in Street Fighter 6 this summer, and switching gears between the two franchises is always tricky. My heart will always lie with Ryu, Chun-Li, and Guile and right now my Mortal Kombat skills are so rusty my opponents are more in danger of tetanus than a skull-cracking uppercut.

Or, to put it another way, I got absolutely creamed in online multiplayer for my first ten matches. My hands thought I was playing Street Fighter, with the muscle memory of holding back to block burned so deeply into my reflexes that I have to consciously remember to hold R2 instead. After my head was torn off a few times I retreated to the bare bones ‘Klassic Towers’ single-player mode to remember how to actually play.

Despite obvious surface similarities to the previous game, Mortal Kombat 1 quickly proves to be very much its own beast. Going in I’d expected the Kameo system to be roughly equivalent to the Assist characters from Marvel vs Capcom — tap a button and Sonya will appear, toss a projectile and then depart (or, for a more direct lineage, like the many Tower Konsumables from MK11). This proves to be merely the skeleton of those systems and MK1 adds a ridiculous amount of depth. At its most basic level, you tap the right shoulder button to summon them, though with directional modifiers and button holds you choose which move your Kameo executes.

Figuring out which Kameo moves tesselate with which characters gives the FGC a lot to chew on. However, even over this brief time (and even with my atrophied MK skills) I managed to figure out a way to get Kano to toss his knives into an opponent’s back while I was attacking from the front, essentially forcing the opponent into a combo-able state. There will be a dizzying amount of available character/Kameo combinations in the full game, and the only thing that gives me pause is that at launch expert players will quickly figure out some incredibly cheesy Kameo infinites.

We’ll find out whether NetherRealm can actually balance this behemoth in a month’s time, though we can already confirm that this looks and plays like a dream. From MKX onwards, the studio pushed hardware when it comes to character and background rendering, taking advantage of a 2D fighting game having relatively fewer things to render and process than a sprawling open-world adventure.

On PlayStation 5 it looks and plays like a silky-smooth 60FPS dream. Each of the fighters is brimming over with character in their pre-fight conversations, every fighting animation feeds into their personality, and the Fatalities are grisly but tiptoe along that so-gross-it’s-fun Itchy & Scratchy vibe that have you giggling rather than puking as your opponent’s guts are minced by a revolving katana shoved down their throat.

I also want to praise the game’s impeccable HDR presentation. I’m lucky enough to play this on an LG OLED and, for example, Liu Kang’s fire-based moves popped off the screen in truly dazzling fashion. Serious love and artistry have also gone into fabric rendering that’s really only appreciable in the smack-talking at the start of the bout, for example, the slightly worn leather of Sub Zero’s mask against the tightly woven fabric of his ninja suit.

All of which bodes well for the full release in a month’s time. Once again, NetherRealm has delivered a distinctive fighting game brimming with personality and Kombat mechanics so deep we can’t see the bottom. This six-character limited beta is already a fun experience, so the full package with the always silly but fun cinematic single-player campaign should be a hoot.

I have concerns about balancing when it comes to character/Kameo combinations, but while it seems inevitable there’ll be cheese galore at launch I’m sure balance patches will soon smooth that out. Beyond that, an odd wrinkle is the omission of a last-gen release. Mortal Kombat 1 is also landing on Switch next month, so if it can be ported there I can’t see a good reason not to invite PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players to the party.

Mortal Kombat 1 spears its way into our hearts on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch on Sept. 14.