Mortal Kombat 10: 5 Killer Things We Learned At E3

3. Interactive Environment

As we speculated from the reveal trailer last week, players really can use the environment to their advantage and it's shown a couple of times in the gameplay trailer. Firstly, you see Scorpion spin himself around on a branch to gain some momentum to royally kick Sub Zero in the chest and you also see D'Vorah swing on some rigging after she recovers from being knocked on her backside by Torr in their harbour based arena. The environments appear to be littered with items and interactive elements this time around. As the two fights progress you can clearly see items in the background highlight with a white aura when a fighter gets close to them, in the D'Vorah/Torr fight you can see pots and boxes in the background as well as a panel on the galleon on the left side of the arena, indicating that you can do something with all of them. In the Sub Zero/Scorpion fight, you can see swords in the ground highlight, as well as branches and tree parts become available to be brought into the fight. It's a huge step forward for the franchise as it has traditionally featured only static arenas which (despite looking awesome and deadly) amounted to nothing more than 20 paces in each direction from centre. Nothing in them was interactive and despite some notable efforts in MK9, it's something other fighting games have managed to do since the days of the PlayStation 2.