PC Gamer wrote:I'm not very good at fighting games, as was evident when I lost four consecutive rounds to my opponent during a Mortal Kombat X preview earlier this week. My opponent ruthlessly uppercutted me into the air, shattered my spine in elaborate animations, and Finished Me by pulling my heart out of my chest à la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, then squeezing the heart and drinking what I imagine was my terribly salty blood.
Still, I like fighting games, and Mortal Kombat in particular, which came into my life at a time when its adolescent obsession with gratuitous, over the top violence matched my own. But I'm only human, and as such prefer winning to losing. That's why I liked Mortal Kombat 9's well-realized story mode, which gave me a way to play for many hours without humiliating myself.
Mortal Kombat X, I'm happy to report, is tailor-made for those who find a lot to enjoy about fighting games, but who may not have what it takes to compete with… well, anyone.
A new way Mortal Kombat X does this is with its online Living Towers. Like the challenge tower in Mortal Kombat 9, each of the Living Towers is a series of fights arranged as challenges with special conditions. Mortal Kombat X's towers, however, are more varied and mercifully shorter.
There are Quick Towers, which you can finish in 15-30 minutes. They're also updated every couple of hours throughout the day, so you'll always see new challenges. The Daily Towers are a little harder and will refresh every 24 hours. Finally, the Premiere Towers, built around special events, holidays, and milestones, are even more challenging, and will last anywhere from a few days to a week.
Each level in the tower has some kind of environmental twist—I saw one where bombs were falling from the sky, another where I had to dodge roving laser traps—and an extra condition that will earn you more points. The conditions I saw were focused on winning rounds while using certain moves. These aren't merely fun, almost puzzle-like elements to introduce to a fighting game—they’re also a great way to force and teach a lone player to discover each fighter's movelist. NetherRealm is still a little vague about what exactly you'll be able to spend these points on, but cosmetic changes to characters is one example.
It also sounds like the best rewards will come from Mortal Kombat X's greater, cross-platform multiplayer Faction War mode. Assuming you're online, when you first start Mortal Kombat X you'll be asked to choose one out of five factions associated with groups in the game's fiction: White Lotus, Brotherhood of Shadow, Black Dragon, Special Forces, or Lin Kuei. Your faction will modify the menus' visual themes, and everything you do in the game will earn points for your faction. You can even enter team fights, where five members of your faction fight five simultaneous fights against another faction, and the team with the most wins gets the points.
At the end of every week, the faction with the most points overall will get a reward, which can even include a special, faction-specific Fatality.