Mortal Kombat 11: 10 Reasons It's NetherRealm's Best Game Ever
A career best.
It wasn't long ago that the Mortal Kombat franchise was in pretty bad shape.
2006's Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, the last mainline entry in the series before 2011's reboot, was released to a mixed reception. While the game was praised for its expansive roster and the Konquest mode, the reuse of assets from the previous games and the troubled custom fatality feature received a more critical response.
Midway Games followed it up with the spin-off Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, which, while totally acceptable, just didn't packed the same punch as the previous Mortal Kombat games. The lack of gory fatalities certainly didn't help.
After Midway Games shut down and evolved into NetherRealm Studios, things began to look up for the series.
The reboot, simply titled Mortal Kombat (MK9 among fans), and its follow up, Mortal Kombat X both reinvigorated the series, while maintaining what made it special.
Mortal Kombat 11, the latest entry in the series, is easily the best yet, and is a testament to all NetherRealm have learnt over the past decade as developers. In this article we're going to be going over exactly what makes MK11 so damn good, from the improved mechanics to the bonkers story.
10. Their Most Balanced Game Yet
Any long term MK and Injustice player will tell you that NetherRealm have always had a problem with balancing their games. Whether it's overpowered characters or inherent, problematic mechanics, players always have to overcome something when heading online.
In MKX, alongside overpowered characters like Cyrax and Tremor, there was the 50/50 problem. For the uninitiated, 50/50 is fighting game lingo for a move that needs to be blocked either overhead or low, meaning the opponent needs to guess what direction to block in.
Nearly every character in MKX had one, and many lead to full combos. The result was a game filled with rush-down characters that gave players little breathing room.
Listening to feedback, NetherRealm decided to make MK11 a much slower game that required a greater deal of patience and planning, with only a few characters having access to 50/50s. Sure there were still problems. On launch, characters like Geras, Erron Black, and Sonya Blade were far better than most others on the roster, but this soon changed with balance patches.
NetherRealm clearly took their time when balancing with MK11, and it shows.