Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection - Review

To this day I can still remember the first time I played a Mortal Kombat game, it was the second game and it was at a friends house. They had the game on Sega and it was amazing, it took some convincing, but I was able to get the Super Nintendo version and it was not quite the same, but I still had fun. That kicked off a fondness for the series, which is why this latest collection piqued my interest. Does this celebration of all things classic Mortal Kombat deliver, or like my SNES version, is it missing the important things?

The kollection, sorry collection, is divided into two parts, playing the games and learning about the history of them. The playing of the games is something I will dive into later on, first I want to talk about the history of the series, because Mortal Kombat has some important notches in its belt. The most important or defining moment early on was how the gore and actions in the game, lead to the creation of the American ESRB, the ratings system for games. But it is not just that, they also dive into how the series ended up spelling combat with a K. There is around 4 hours of interviews with the original team, along with old footage that was shot during development for many of the earlier games. While most segments barely break 5 minutes, if that, it just makes it easy to follow the progression of events.

What is really nice is that between the video parts, you sometimes get concept art pieces, or marketing materials to look at, giving you more insights into the series. My only real issue with the documentary is that there is no play all, which would have been nice. Another complain is more to do with the random YouTube people in there, they might be nice folks, but I don’t want to hear from some random folks who had nothing to do with the creation of the game.

Once you have watched the documentary stuff, or if you don’t care about it, you can jump into playing the games. Now there are 11 games in the collection, but for some of them like the original Mortal Kombat, you get a number of variations. In the case of the original game you get the Arcade game, where it all began, then the Super Nintendo, Mega Drive (or Genesis if you are American), Game Boy and Game Gear. What is great about all the variations, is you get to see how the core aspects of the series were kept intact for the hardware, but other elements may have changed. The first game I wanted to give a go to was Deadly Alliance on the Game Boy Advance, as I remember it was in a kiosk when I was working retail and I should not have done that.

This is what happens with games like this, products of their time that shine in their moment of release, but time is never that kind to. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great port and I had no issues in playing it, but taking a game that was made for a 7.4cm screen and putting it on an 85inch display, it don’t look the best. I of course had to jump back and play the original arcade game, something that I never had the chance to do when it first released, just due to the lack of arcades around where I lived. It was fine, but upon playing it, you can see it’s like Street Fighter. Both games created a foundation for their first game, but the sequel is where they found their groove. I also made sure to put some time into Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, because I remember it being a bad game when it first released and it was not better today. While the games are the same, there are some extra additions to this release, namely rewind and unlocks being, well unlocked. In a weird exclusion, none of the Nintendo 64 games are included in the collection, so Mortal Kombat 4 only has the arcade release and not any of the home console ports.

Of course, I was playing on Nintendo Switch 2 and while I would have loved to have played an arcade game with the arcade stick, that was just not possible. I do have however the recreated controllers form Nintendo for their Nintendo Switch Online service, that is the NES, SNES and Mega Drive, both the PAL and Japan versions. So, connecting them to my Switch 2 meant I could replay those games with the right controller, for the GameBoy games, I just used the NES controller. It was such a blast from the past, replaying those games with the right controller, but it did make me wish I had a PlayStation controller for my Switch 2. For those curious I did hook up the PlayStation Classic controller to my Switch 2 dock, but it just did not get detected at all. Apart from the GameBoy Advance games having A set to B and B set to Y, I had no issues in playing any of the games, though just know using replica controllers does hinder your access to the rewind function. For those who have other controllers, or don’t like the B button being mapped to Y, you can remap any of the buttons for all the games and they stick, so you don’t have to do it each time you want to play.

The games presentation is a bit of a mixed bag, simply due to how much is going on. When you are in the Krypt, the place where the documentary and all the other bits and bobs live, it displays as a timeline. You move across the timeline, going from the earliest days to today and you get a lot of detail, before you jump into a section. When you are playing the games, you get a similar timeline look, going from oldest to most recent, but here you can filter games out. If you never played the arcade versions and don’t wish to do that, you can filter them out, it makes getting to the games you love easier.

When you are playing games, this is where the mixed feelings come in, sometimes you will get a border like an old school CRT tv, other times it is the frame of an arcade cabinet. You can turn those off if you like, but I feel that the game would have been better off, if it offered up fun art to display instead. The CRT filter works great for the games, but again you can turn it off, if you so desire. The biggest complaint I have about the visuals is the lack of ability to display games at their original resolution. Sure, playing any of those games at their real scale on a 4K display may not sound ideal, but when in handheld on Switch 2, it would have been great.

The sound is fine, there is nothing incredibly amazing here, because the games themselves are again products of their times. The early games had issues with limited sound processing options and they have not ‘corrected’ that here, what you get in this collection is what you go upon its original release. The documentary has some nice clear spoken folks, but you can turn on subtitles if you need them, which is a welcome touch.

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is a great release, if you are a fan of the Mortal Kombat series. The documentary is well worth the price of admission alone, but the sheer number of games, once you round up all their variants will keep you going for a while. The omission of a number of titles makes little sense, especially when they are there on some platforms already. The features of rewind, button mapping and more are welcome additions and will make even the most challenging game more accessible. If you are a fan of the series, this is one release you should have in your kollection.

The Score

8.5

Review code provided by Atari

The Pros

The presentation of the documentary and assets is easy to follow and makes for a great time

Rewind, button mapping and other modern features make even the most unforgiving game playable today…

The Cons

…but the lack of real size viewing of the games and border options, feel like a missed chance

There are a number of games from the time, that are just missing or only have a single version included and it makes no sense