When our review-in-progress was first published, the balance of difficulty seen in the Towers Of Time was in such a state that the odds were always stacked against you–negative environmental modifiers only affected you and not your opponent, AI difficulty was relentlessly high, opponents were more robust, and as a result the challenges often felt horribly cruel and unbalanced. There was one instance where game servers went down on all platforms, and I lost my progress on a Tower of Time. One is “origin story clothes”, which you see with other characters, and another is “street clothes”, which is where I went with Kano. Of course, if you’re the kind of player that couldn’t care less about the advanced stuff and just wants to jump in and see blood spilled, Mortal Kombat 11 can certainly be just as entertaining. It’s an impressive resource that doesn’t just give you a better understanding of Mortal Kombat 11’s systems, but a deeper understanding of fighting game mechanics in general–knowledge that you can take to any other title.

Nearly 20 years later, SNK has finally given the fighting game the proper PC treatment by releasing it with numerous additional graphics options, leaderboards, and rollback, online versus play. Some key changes streamline the mechanics of MK11, resulting in a fighting system that feels more active and aggressive than its predecessors. The difficulty curve and number of challenges you need to tackle are reasonable enough that achieving the prizes at the end of a tower, and the end of a whole island of towers, always feels within reach. No thread was tough enough to handle this job so I punched holes through the bottom of the yolk all the way around and used black ribbon to stich through the holes and attach the Yoke around the collar of the tabard and to my surprise it actually worked.

Will you finish the job? Losing progress can also be an issue if, for example, you duck out to your console’s dashboard to share a video clip of a close victory, which will suspend your game and disconnect you from its servers. Predetermined combo strings, flashy special moves, and humorously over-the-top barbarity means that the game is a joy to watch and participate in, whether the players are just messing around or taking it seriously.

The Krypt in Mortal Kombat 11 is a completely reimagined recreation of Shang Tsung’s island, the location of the very first Mortal Kombat game from 1992. Exploring the location, which involves finding items to open up paths to new areas, is an exciting experience in itself–there’s a basic joy in simply taking in the visual splendor of certain locations, especially if you retain any memories of Mortal Kombat’s stages (although it should be noted that the Nintendo Switch version is noticeably less visually splendorous).