If you happen to be a Playstation Plus subscriber then you are one of the few privileged people who get to play the new Mortal Kombat demo before anyone else. In fact, many people have been paying the Playstation Plus subscription fee just to be able to play the new Mortal Kombat early. I just so happen to be one of those people.

Before we even get into gameplay let me say that this game has a lot of buttons. In fact, it has too many buttons. The basic attack buttons are front punch, back punch, front kick, and back kick. Front and back are kind of misnomers, and it helps to think of the buttons as “light and heavy” punches and kicks when you do your moves. Outside of your basic attacks you have a throw button and a block button which do basically what you think they do. There is a tag button which I assume lets you switch to your other character in tag team modes, but none of these modes were available for play in the demo. There is no run button, like there was in MK3, but there is a “flip stance” button, which turns your character around and does …. absolutely nothing other than let you look at Mileena’s ass.

Now, think about this for a second, that’s eight buttons you need to play the game. This means the game was clearly designed for a pad and not an arcade stick. That being said the official Mortal Kombat Arcade Stick that comes with the Tournament Edition of the game only has six buttons! There must be some button combos I’m not figuring out here. If you got rid of the tag and flip stance buttons the game would be playable, but for no apparent reason the flip stance button is used in conjunction with the block button to activate X-Ray attacks, which are the most powerful attacks in the game. On a pad, this is simply L2 and R2 pressed together, but on a stick … I don’t know!? I’m honestly confused. Do we really have a game that can’t be played with its official joystick?

Well, let’s forget joystick woes for a minute and instead talk about the actual game mechanics. You are able to play as Scorpion, Johnny Cage, Mileena, and Sub-Zero in this demo, and they all have their entire move list available to them. The first thing I noticed is that characters don’t really differ in their walk speeds or jump heights. Everyone walks forward at the same speed, and walks backward at the same, slightly slower speed. Everyone jumps the same distance and moves the same distance forward or backward when doing a forward or backward jump. This will make every character easier to learn, but cuts down on the diversity a bit.

Each character can dash forward or backward, but oddly enough dashing actually moves slower than simply walking. Dashing only makes your character quickly take a short step forward or back that doesn’t cover that much ground. Its main use is that you can cancel out certain moves into a dash, and you can cancel out a dash into just about any move, or throw, or even a block. This makes it a excellent comboing tool, as well as a tool to make certain whiffed moves safe. Back dashing in particular covers almost no ground so it will primarily be used to cancel moves into a block.

There are four kinds of attacks in Mortal Kombat. There are basic normals, command normals, combo attacks, and special attacks. Basic normals are what you would expect them to be. They are basic attacks that are the simplest tools of the game. As I said before each character has two punches and kicks, with front punch/kick being the weaker of the two, and back punch/kick being the stronger. You can do these in the air, while crouching, or whenever and wherever. The basic poking game is played with these attacks.

Command normals on the other hand combine a direction and an attack button. These range from your basic sweeps and “toasty” uppercuts, to special attacks that utilize your character’s weapons (which you may remember from games such as Mortal Kombat Armageddon.) Most characters don’t take out their weapons while fighting unless you are using command normal. Command normals also generally have added effects. Some stun or stagger your opponent, while others launch your opponent so you can follow up with an air combo. They are situational in use, and most are slow but deal lots more damage than basic normal attacks.

Then there are combo attacks, which really are something you would be more likely to see in a 3D fighter rather than a 2D fighter. Basically, stringing together specific button sequences produces specific strings of hits. This isn’t like Marvel or Blazblue where every time you press a button the same attack comes out. This is more like Soul Calibur or Tekken, where pressing a button twice makes the second move different than the first. All combo attacks are actually pretty short, and only really give you two to three hits at max. It’s finding other moves that link together these small combo strings into larger combos that really starts building up the damage. As such, it helps if you think of each combo as its own isolated special move rather than a series of individual moves.

Finally, there are special moves themselves, which are all the cool powers your character has. Sub-Zero gets to throw freezing projectiles, Scorpion has his “get over here” spear, Mileena throws daggers, it’s all the basic stuff you remember from the old school Mortal Kombat games. The button inputs are really really simple. They are all just two directions and an attack button. Even basic fireball motions only really read the down and the forward inputs, so if you skip down-forward entirely the move will still come out. Once again, this is proof positive that the game was designed with a pad in mind.

Special moves are way more balanced in this game than they were in previous Mortal Kombats. For example, Scorpion can link two combos together by shooting his spear between the two. However, he can’t link a third because the second time a spear is used in a combo it drags the opponent to the ground out of combo range. Similarly Sub-Zero can fire two ice projectiles, one after another, but the second one won’t refreeze the opponent. It won’t backlash freeze Sub-Zero like it did in the older Mortal Kombats either, it will simply register as a second hit.

I’m not entirely sure how combos work in this game. The combo counter only shows up after your combo ends, at which point it tells you how many hits you had, as well as a damage percentile underneath it. I think this damage percentile is how much damage is added on to your combo, not subtracted. I’m not really sure. I didn’t do a whole lot of testing on actual damage amounts, but if this is the case, we can be sure to see some ludicrous 50-100% damage combos in the future. I don’t know if that unbalances the game or not. We will have to wait and see.

At the bottom of the screen there is a super bar that has three levels to it. You can use one level of this bar in order to use EX versions of your special moves. So for example, Scorpion fires two spears instead of one, and Sub-Zero fires an ice-beam rather than an ice-ball. For two levels you can perform a “breaker” which basically interrupts your opponent’s combos. If you manage to fill your bar all the way, you can spend all three levels on your character’s powerful X-Ray attack. These attacks (basically super moves) do obscene amounts of damage, and they can mean the difference between a win or a loss.

Building meter is actually pretty hard in this game. You start the fight with one level of meter stocked, and getting the first attack gives you a whole other level. Simply attacking doesn’t build any meter whether you whiff or hit, but using special moves on the other hand builds a tiny bit of meter, but really not that much. Getting hit, on the other hand, builds meter very quickly, so in a way it functions like the revenge meter in Super Street Fighter IV. However, the oddest way to build meter, is to attack a blocking opponent. Attacking a blocking opponent builds meter for you, but not the opponent. That’s kind of weird and I still can’t figure out why they would make that design decision.

Meter stays constant between rounds so there is a certain bit of natural meter hoarding that takes place, especially considering how hard it is to build meter in the first place. Considering this, the first attack bonus is a huge advantage and I would do anything in my power to get it every round. Once again I’m not sure if this unbalanced the game, but it will certainly make it aggressive.

Of course then there are the lovely, lovely fatalities. These moves still don’t do anything to help you win the match, but they sure do let you finish your opponent off in flashy ways. Fatalities have also been simplified, only taking three button inputs to execute. Fatalities run the gamut of awesome to kind of lame. Honestly, Scorpions “cut you in three” fatality doesn’t look all that visually impressive. However, Mileena’s “chew on your face fatality” is pretty damn disturbing. Stage fatalities are also pretty simple to pull off and are generally way cooler than character fatalities. After playing through the single-player demo you get to see a movie of stuff from the full game, and some stage fatalities showcased included being eaten by treants, having your face burned off in lava, and even getting run over by a taxi. It actually looks like every stage has a stage fatality associated with it now.

If I had to describe my experience with the new Mortal Kombat in one word, it would be “weird.” It’s a 2D fighter, but it has a lot of elements of 3D fighters that you wouldn’t really expect to see in a 2D plane. Some of these are basic Mortal Kombat artifacts like a block button, but other like dial-a-combo strings seem to be put in to make this game feel more like the 3D Mortal Kombat games. The moves are simple to do, but meter is a bitch to build and fills in strange ways. The dashes don’t dash, front and back moves don’t actually move to the front or back, and there is a button that turns your character around and does nothing else. This is all packaged inside an eight button game that will be sold with a six button joystick. What is this? I don’t even!?

Regardless of how weird my experience was, I have to say I had fun with the new Mortal Kombat demo. If anything the game is pretty, with blood and gore bursting from character’s bodies in excruciating detail. The visual damage on the character models is also a pretty nice touch. Sometimes I would finish a match missing an eyeball with a hole in my chest. However, I can’t help but think that’s the only reason I’m having fun. The game looks good, and feels good, and makes me smile with juvenile glee, but if I take a step back, I get really confused. I don’t understand the meter mechanics, I don’t understand the button layout, I don’t understand the combo mechanics (regardless of how fun they are and how cool they look), and I don’t really understand the strategy to the game.

It doesn’t really play like old school or new school Mortal Kombat, but rather something in between. It’s halfway between slow and fast, with a huge damage output and not many defensive options outside of blocking. It gave me a taste of what’s to come, but without the full product (or a guide really explaining the game systems to me) I can’t tell if it’s a “good game” or not. All I really know is that it’s a fun game, and I suppose that’s all that matters.

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