It's a gorgeous game, first and foremost. Best looking one by a long shot.
The tutorial is freaking amazing, and can train a new player and veteran alike. Extremely well put together, and almost a behind the scenes of the game in the game. Even if you don't play it, the to find some of the strategy or advanced tutorials on YouTube and take a look.
Story mode was really well put together, which surprised me. I guess I'm still not used to there being one in these types of games. Towers of time and Klassic towers are great fun, the Krypt is impressive and full of throwbacks and Easter eggs.
But then there is the grind. Not the achievement grind, that's easy, but the completionist grind. I admittedly do not care at all about most of the skins, the weapon and clothing customization, or anything that doesn't involve spilling blood in Mortal Kombat games. There are seriously hundreds if not thousands of available options. And that's where the grind kicks in. You can get most of these things in the Krypt, but the "good ones" are tied to the time tower mode, specifically the character towers.
These are sets of towers, I'm up to stage 3 on Noob, not sure how many there are, but sets that consist of 3 to 5 towers each. Some of these have requirements like 25 throws or 75 fatalities to unlock. But it amounts to about 100 or so fights PER CHARACTER to unlock the customization options. A goodly amount for sure, but it doesn't stop there either.
I mentioned the Krypt, a place to go spend coins you earn while playing the game to get character art, consumables (apparently a thing in MK now), but also fatalities and brutalities are scattered throughout. To get to the best chests with the best moves and gear, and actually "finish" the krypt, which isn't a requirement thankfully, you have to put a severed head on a spike. To get the severed head, you have to kill the same person with 50 fatalities. With 25 different characters, so far, this is a lot of matches if you want it all. You have to kill each character, with the same character 50 times to get their head.
But Rev, that's a typical grindfest like most every game has today.
This is what I'm not sure how to feel about. You can opt for the AI fight for you. With the customization options available, this makes the AI a beast. My Noob has 197 battles and only 25 losses, the majority of which have come during endurance matches as the AI isn't quite health conservative.
But this changes the entire grind into pressing A every 2 minutes after a match. You can't automate it, at least not without a special controller our playing on PC, but you don't really have to play either. There's also no fast forward option on the towers, so you can watch it all in real time. Kinda nice, but kinda annoying since there is another new mode.
AI battles, where you pick a team of fighters and pit them against someone else's team. 3 fighters, best of 3 matches. but only the AI fight. You can at least speed this up to 4x, which make the matches take literal seconds.
I'm just not sure about how I feel on this, letting the game play itself. Sure it's fun to watch, but it's not fully autonomous so you can't leave or go to bed and still rack up points. But if the computer is going to play, in real time, why even have a game?
