Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection review: Cooler than Sub-Zero, creakier than Shang Tsung

There are few video game series as iconic to Western audiences as Mortal Kombat.

For a period of a few glorious years in the early ’90s, Midway’s fighting series was the coolest thing imaginable – a viable contender to Street Fighter, but one your parents didn’t want you to play.

From its legendary TV ad with the kids screaming “MORTAL KOMBAAAAAAT” in the streets, to the cult favourite movie and its legendary title theme, early era Mortal Kombat was an obsession for a generation of players, myself included.

The news that Digital Eclipse was putting together the definitive compilation of early Mortal Kombat games, then, was met with joy from long-time fans of the series. Now that its here, it’s a mostly outstanding offering.

As the name suggests, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection gathers a bunch of classic games – sorry, klassik games – from the series, covering a selection of early entries ranging from the original game in 1992 up to Mortal Kombat Tournament Edition for the Game Boy Advance in 2003.

Counting the multiple versions of each game, there’s a total of 23 releases to play through here. The full list is as follows:

• Mortal Kombat – Arcade, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Gear
• Mortal Kombat II – Arcade, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, 32X
• Mortal Kombat 3 – Arcade, SNES, Mega Drive
• Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 – Arcade, SNES, WaveNet Arcade
• Mortal Kombat Trilogy – PlayStation
• Mortal Kombat 4 – Arcade
• Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero – PlayStation
• Mortal Kombat: Special Forces – PlayStation
• Mortal Kombat Advance – GBA
• Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance – GBA
• Mortal Kombat Tournament Edition – GBA

Performance is as solid as you would expect from a Digital Eclipse game – after all, with the exception of Mortal Kombat 4 and the obscenely rare WaveNet version of UMK3, these are games you could emulate fairly easily through less scrupulous means.

Where Digital Eclipse has gone the extra mile is in all the new options which can be toggled for each game to make them more convenient to play decades later. Almost every version of every main game lets you bring up a context sensitive move list, the games’ 4:3 aspect ratio conveniently sitting the list to the side of the screen without overlapping the game itself.

Defeat an enemy and trigger the iconic “Finish Them” moment, and all your fatalities, pit fatalities, friendships, babaliities, brutalities or anything else available to you at the moment will appear on the list, meaning you no longer have to memorise everything.

10-year-old me – who used to traipse to the Time Capsule swimming pool to play its Mortal Kombat 2 arcade machine while clutching my imported, dog-eared, over-referenced copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly with the move lists in it – would have killed for something like this. Most games also have new options to make the Finish Them time either longer or infinite, to make performing fatalities less stressful.

All the cheats that players used to have to memorise are all menu toggles now, too. To be clear, if you crave authenticity you can still manually enter ABACABB to turn on the blood in the first Mortal Kombat on the Mega Drive / Genesis, along with the ‘DULLARD’ cheat to activate its secret menu. But now there’s the option to just activate these right away, along with any of the other cheats in the other games.

Want to reach the Reptile fight right away in Mortal Kombat without going through the lengthy combination of luck and skill required to unlock it? Done. Same goes for Smoke, Jade and Noob Saibot in MK2.

“Want to reach the Reptile fight right away in Mortal Kombat without going through the lengthy combination of luck and skill required to unlock it? Done. Same goes for Smoke, Jade and Noob Saibot in MK2.”

The extra options even extend to trying to make the weaker games in the collection more tolerable to play. A lot has been written about how painfully awful Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero was, for example, mainly thanks to its irritating tendency to spring insta-kill traps on the player without warning.

This time around – again, entirely optionally – you can either use rewind to undo these sucker punches, or turn on a new option for 1,000 lives so you can brute force your way through these previously impenetrable adventures. On top of this, there’s a ‘Modern Controls’ option which lets you turn Sub-Zero around at any time – something he had a lovely habit of not doing – by moving the right stick.

The games themselves are only half the story when it comes to a Digital Eclipse collection, however. The studio seemingly outright refuses to handle retro compilations without ensuring a wealth of supplementary material, and Legacy Kollection’s Krypt mode contains another of its trademark interactive museums, as seen in Atari 50, Tetris Forever and its Gold Masters Series, offering players another wonderful helping of interactive timelines.

There’s over three hours of genuinely entertaining and fascinating interview footage here, and it’s refreshingly frank too – the censored SNES port of Mortal Kombat is discussed as the disappointment it was, and there’s something oddly endearing about watching interviewees tearing apart the awful Game Boy version of Mortal Kombat just before the timeline lets you play it for yourself.

The timelines provided here mainly cover the time period between the games in the collection – from the early careers of co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias, to their joining forces to make the first game, to the Mortal Mania which followed and beyond – with only brief mentions of the more modern, current gen releases for the sake of completion (understandably so, given its retro focus).

The level of dedication here, then, is of a typically industry-high standard. Nobody is doing retro better than Digital Eclipse at the moment, and this is another perfect example. The fact that it includes the WaveNet version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 – which to 99% of players won’t seem that different to the normal version, but to series devotees is one of their ultimate holy grails – is crazy.

Any tweaks made to the actual games themselves are minimal, and nothing that fans would be arguing to keep in there. In the original version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy, for example, playing as or against Shang Tsung was always frustrating because any time he transformed into another character the game froze while the PlayStation loaded that character into memory. Those pauses have now been removed, and while there’s a case to argue for authenticity, only masochists would say it was better the way it was.

“Nobody is doing retro better than Digital Eclipse at the moment, and this is another perfect example. The fact that it includes the WaveNet version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 – which to 99% of players won’t seem that different to the normal version, but to series devotees is one of their ultimate holy grails – is crazy.”

There are only two drawbacks to this collection, and one of them is a fairly notable one. The less pressing matter is that while Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection focuses on a specific time period in the series’ history, it’s not a definitive catalogue of releases from that time. I love having the 32X version of Mortal Kombat 2 in there, but it makes the lack of the Mega CD / Sega CD version of the first Mortal Kombat a little odd. While Digital Eclipse doesn’t usually dabble with Dreamcast stuff – meaning Mortal Kombat Gold might have been a stretch to get running well on something like the Switch – the fact that PlayStation games are in there means the home port of Mortal Kombat 4 would have been nice too.

Similarly, having the handheld versions of each game is an absolute treat because while some of them may be objectively awful, for some people – as the documentary footage demonstrates – these were the versions they had as a child. With that in mind, then, it would have been nice to see the Game Boy Color version of Mortal Kombat 4 in there (along with the PlayStation and N64 versions, for that matter).

Digital Eclipse is no stranger to adding more content to its games post-launch – this very collection is getting a new mode later on called The Khronicle of the Realms, which provides an “illustrated guide to the lore and narrative of the series” – so hopefully that means there’s still a chance to see some of those other versions as additional little bonuses.

The main drawback here, however – and it’s a completely subjective one that Digital Eclipse could never do anything about – is that the early Mortal Kombat games just don’t hold up as well as something like Street Fighter 2 does. The AI is cheaper than Free Comic Book Day – Liu Kang’s instant fireballs every time you jump in MK2 still raises my blood pressure all these years later – and while it’s still as satisfying as ever to pull off roundhouse kicks, sweeps and that majestic uppercut, the move sets are generally quite limited.

I say this as someone who was obsessed with Mortal Kombat as a child, and absorbed everything I could get my hands on. I wore out my VHS copies of the Mortal Kombat movie and its animated spin-off The Journey Begins. I danced around to the wonderfully awful cheesy Belgian techno CD Mortal Kombat: The Album. I got my aunt in the US to send me every issue of the comic books made by Malibu Comics (Rayden and Kano teaming up? Clutch my pearls!).

I loved everything about Mortal Kombat, and Digital Eclipse’s interactive timelines here were an absolute treat to wade through, staring in awe at the footage of the fighters performing their moves, discovering the recreated animations of unused fatalities and learning anecdotes and other trivia I had never heard about before. If you’re a Mortal Kombat fan, this is an essential collection.

It’s just that each time I then got to the part in the timeline where each game then appeared and I got to play it, that’s when my engagement dropped a little, as the infuriatingly Jedi-like AI did its very best to ruin my day. I love Mortal Kombat, and I love a lot about the games, but even with all the brilliant quality of life features Digital Eclipse added they’re still ultimately a bit clunky by today’s standards.

23 games is undoubtedly a brilliant offering, and Digital Eclipse’s commitment to ensuring that each game’s multiple versions is available is one I never want to see stopping. That said, those 23 games include a number of releases that, while absolutely deserving of their place in the compilation, are awful. The Game Boy and Game Gear versions of MK1, Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces were infamous at the time for how dismal they were, and a quarter century later they certainly haven’t aged like wine.

This is the only reason why, while I would still strongly recommend Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection to anyone with an interest in the series’ history, I wouldn’t quite hold it up there alongside something like Tetris Forever, another Digital Eclipse collection which has the added benefit of being based on an objectively excellent game. Both collections serve as an excellent introduction to newcomers who want to find out more about an iconic series, but those early Mortal Kombat games are showing their age a little more these days, meaning what’s on offer here, to quote Shao Khan, is merely “excellent” rather than “outstanding”.