I admit to some surprise.
A couple of months ago, NetherRealm Studios released a new mobile fighting game called WWE Immortals, which is a “card-based” fighting game similar to the mobile version of Injustice: Gods Among Us. With the release of WWE Immortals coming so close to the release of Mortal Kombat X for consoles and PC, I took that to mean that we wouldn’t be seeing a mobile version of the newest MK.
It turns out I was wrong. Yesterday, NRS announced that they were releasing a mobile version of Mortal Kombat X.
On one hand, I’m really looking forward to this game. I haven’t owned a dedicated portable gaming console since the Game Boy Advance, so the most “recent” (as opposed to a port of an older game) Mortal Kombat I’ve had in a portable format was Mortal Kombat: Tournament Edition, which was a companion release to Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance for GBA. It’ll be nice to be able to play MK on my phone and my tablet, which have essentially become my portable gaming devices in the interim. Mortal Kombat X will apparently have the same kind of gameplay as Injustice, which I found to be fun to play. The gameplay style works well on touchscreens; I had EA’s port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for iPhone, and found that even with the simplified controls it was annoying to play.
On the other hand, Mortal Kombat X is also similar to Injustice in that it’s free-to-play. While I enjoyed playing Injustice on my tablet, I realized relatively quickly that in order to make any large amount of headway in the game, I would have to play either an insane amount of time or buy a lot of credits from the online store. I’d much rather pay a fixed price and have everything available from the get-go. Of course, that’s not going to happen, as free-to-play is much more profitable than a fixed price is. I also worry that the game may not run properly on the iPhone 5c I use; I’ve already encountered one recent game that won’t run on it (Vainglory).
In any event, I’ll still definitely pick it up when it becomes available. Even if it doesn’t run on my phone, it’ll run on my tablet. The free-to-play portion will annoy me, but if the game is fun enough I can deal with that. Either way, it’ll be nice to have a recent MK game that’s portable and plays well. :-)