The biggest reason that modern Mortal Kombat is able to be more than a laughable artifact of ’90s shock culture is its self-awareness. Mortal Kombat is and always has been a dumb mishmash of puerile ultra-violence and action movie cliches, but its developers learned to embrace the silliness a long time ago. Netherrealm Studios’ goofy love for the series is earnest and infectious, an attitude the developers harnessed to great effect in its 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot. That game was a tribute to (and modernization of) the series’ roots. The follow-up, Mortal Kombat X, isn’t as transformational, but it takes the reboot’s formula and expands it in ways both subtle and spectacular. It’s a maturation, but it’s by no means mature. That’s the way it should be.
The evolution of Mortal Kombat X’s fatalities might be the most telling. Powered by modern game machines and the pressure to top the barbaric finishing sequences of nine other Mortal Kombat games, MKX pushes fatalities to a disturbing new extreme. They’ve become 15-second scenes with elaborate choreography and camera angles. Violence this graphic is never going to have a universal appeal, but Netherrealm tries its best to temper the executions with more humor than before. A new focus on comedic timing and cinematography goes a long way—with details like the camera lingering on a corpse’s waggling tongue after Scorpion slices its face off—but the absurd extravagance of these scenes is often funny in itself. It’s not enough to hug a guy so hard that his head explodes. No, the job’s not done until you squeeze a fountain of viscera out of his newfound neck hole. When every fatality is this ridiculous, the result is less torture porn and more slapstick by way of Takashi Miike.
That’s what a modern Mortal Kombat needs to be: excessive to the point of absurdity. It’s an ethos that permeates the game well beyond the cartoonish violence. Take the Krypt, which is where you go to spend the Koins you earn from playing the game on new finishing moves and costumes. It debuted several games back as little more than a fancy menu screen, and it became a navigable environment in Mortal Kombat 2011. But that still wasn’t far enough. MKX’s Krypt is a first-person adventure game, with simple puzzles and collectible items that open up new areas to explore. Netherrealm built a Krypt that could have been a separate (albeit shallow) game just to house unlockable doodads. It’s an unnecessary bit of obfuscation, but true to form, it’s a charming, decadent diversion.
There are plenty of more traditional activities for players who prefer to go it solo, and they too have been beefed up beyond expectation. MKX features a handful of static “Towers,” your typical string of unrelated fights against computer-controlled opponents, in which to cut your teeth and chase high scores. More interesting, though, are the “Living Towers,” three sets of challenges that Netherrealm updates over time—one hourly, one daily, and one when they feel like promoting a new purchasable character. I found myself coming back for these. Clocking in at around 10 minutes each, they’re the perfect length for killing some time or cooling off after a stranger crushes your ego in online kombat.