So, uh, still some stability issues, apparently. First: I took this screenshot about 30 seconds before typing this sentence, and after I took the screenshot, the game crashed. Let’s have a quick looksee at the controls.
(And no, Window Boxing does not let you punch Windows.) We’ll talk about how it all runs and looks a little bit later, though. Most of them won’t go too much higher – Anti-Aliasing really does appear to only have “Off” or “FXAA”, unless I’m missing something, and while I can turn up the Anisotropic Filtering a bit more or raise the Shadow Quality another step, what you see is pretty much what you get.
In terms of PC specific options, though, there’s this lot: You’ve got a generalised set of video options that let you adjust the brightness, contrast, and gamma so that everything is actually visible on screen, which I greatly appreciate because it means I can play this with the sun shining through the window. With that out of the way and the game fully installed, though: how are things? Well, let’s have a look at the options first, complete with a FRAPS FPS counter in the corner because I’m an idiot. (And the Configure option still appears to do nothing, so I can only assume it’s either broken or it does some sort of automatic configuration.) So yeah, the “streaming gameplay” system doesn’t actually work that well.
This is the story-heavy Mortal Kombat, I suppose. Quick-Time Events? In my fighting game cutscenes? Well… alright. The other problem is that, even when it works, it seems to be beset with problems I managed to get through the tutorial and mess around with a couple of single fights, but these tended to suffer big framerate drops… which actually disappeared once the entire game had finished downloading. The problem is that Mortal Kombat X seems to be a little unsure about what should actually be locked off.
The idea seems to be that anything which has yet to download is locked off I couldn’t, for instance, access the Story Mode at all. I picked a faction mostly at random, and once on the title screen, went into the options to check things out. At the end of the war, all players in the winning faction get rewards. I was then introduced to the Faction War, which is an interesting little feature – you pick one of five factions, and everything you do in the game contributes to their points in some sort of big online competition. The usual publisher and developer intros popped up, and hooray, I have access to the title screen. So, okay, I’ll just play the game and worry about configuring it all later. Unlike the PS2-era games, where Fatalities were comical little things that resulted in people exploding into red balls, some of these ones are really vicious. It immediately closed with an error message. Pressing “Play” brought up a launcher window asking me if I wanted to play or configure. These 29 DLCs varied between about 200MB and 400MB, barring the final one which was 10GB and I think was the game’s Story Mode. I was downloading it long after people had already been complaining about this on the internet, so I decided not to jump in immediately after my initial 3GB download finished, and instead grabbed the first 10 (of 29) “install” DLCs. The downside that’s less immediately obvious is that, uh, the streaming system didn’t exactly work. Which is a very interesting definition of “pre-load.” The (very obvious) downside is that this was apparently also enabled for pre-loads, so anyone who purchased early downloaded a 3GB file, and then (as I understand it) had to download the remaining 27GB once the game was actually out. There’s nothing like slapping Liu Kang with a bit of wood. Big fan of the stage interaction attacks, and glad they made their way over from Injustice, with some cinematic improvements.