Mortal Kombat rises again and seemingly taking a cue from Capcom and Street Fighter IV; it's gone back to its 2D roots. Namely, some of the more complicated combo practices of the 3D Kombats, such as Deadly Alliance have been streamlined down or removed completely. Aside from removing more complicated combo systems involving switching fighting styles and weapons, this new Mortal Kombat also partially re-writes the story of the franchise and starts over from the beginning.

Story

This new Mortal Kombat reboots not just the series, it reboots the story line as well, going back to the original tournaments from the first three games, essentially reuniting the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 line-up to retell the stories of the first three games in order. This retelling of the story falls into a Story mode in the game, which follows specific characters in individual chapters to clearly chronicle the early events of the series. Players follow the roles of specific characters and their story line through several matches as they move through the story. Battles are both relevant to the plot and general sparring between characters to settle disputes. Fights are both one-on-one, and one-on-two, similar to those introduced in the titles original game, with the exception that now, the dual-member opponent team's characters will switch in and out of the action on the fly. Some original story elements have been re-written as well and characters from later games in the series have plot lines in previous stories. For instance, a back-story for Cyrax and Sektor appears during the story following the tournament from the original Mortal Kombat.

The character roster is made up mostly of characters found in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, with some exceptions. For instance, Quan Chi appears in this new incarnation and he first appeared as a regular in the main fighting series in Mortal Kombat 4. Players can expect to see the Cyber Ninjas in both human and cyborg form.

Modes

This Mortal Kombat reboot contains a multitude of game modes, options, and variations. Besides the Story mode, which offers arguably the clearest and most direct telling of the story in the history of the franchise, there are arcade-style modes akin to the standard gameplay set-up of titles Mortal Kombat II and 3, and several options to this style. The Test Your Might mini-games return with a vast collection of varying events in a Challenge Tower featuring 300 challenges for players to tackle. Challenges vary wildly to anything from only blocking attacks, fighting using only special moves, fending off hordes of zombies, and several tailor-made for specific characters--for instance, one challenge has players fighting as Johnny Cage and a film director to defend a movie set from Jax and Sonya.

There is a Fight menu with a variety of menus, including tag battles and several mini-games, including one slot machine style game and testing a player's pure skill, rather than brute force. A variation of the Test Your Might challenges appears (along with a return of the original incarnation) called Test Your Strike, in which players must build energy with button presses and then unleash an attack at a very specific point to break a specific object. For instance, where Test Your Might was to break through a stack of boards or other objects, the new variation and it's specific timing is to break an internal object, i.e. a differently colored brick within a stack of other bricks.