Have You Played... Mortal Kombat X?

With Mortal Kombat 11 lurking around the corner, there's no better time to look back at the previous game: Mortal Kombat X. It came just a few years after the rebooted timeline shook the series in more ways than one, the events of Mortal Kombat (9) setting a whole new future in stone.

Mortal Kombat X also introduced the idea that every character had three variations. They're all built on the same core character, with the same combos and special moves, but each variant has unique moves, combos, and other such traits that change things drastically.

This attempts to deal with one of the main issues I have with fighting games: redundant characters. Here, if there's a character who isn't very good, you can just try a different version of the same character, rather than completely rule them out. If a character looks cool to you, but one variant is a dud, the whole character isn't completely useless.

Still there is a continuation of the timeline that shakes things further. In the 9th instalment, characters died and became Revenants under the control of the wizard Quan Chi, who serves the fallen Elder God, Shinnok [See issue ninety billion, Kombat fans! - Ed]. So in Mortal Kombat 10, there are new characters and returning favourites, as well as a host of offline and online modes. Aside from the regular fatalities, there's also returning Brutalities that are reworked to involve more skill and are a lot more rewarding to execute. There's also some very dark humour in the fatalities; Johnny Cage's first fatality may be the best one, though Cassie Cage takes a very close second.