I had a very pleasant experience with this game, the story is captivating, the pixel art is magnificent, I think for the first time in my life I played an aquatic section that I really liked. The cutscenes animation reminiscent of Blasphemous, the armors that instantly refers to the Saint Seiya anime, so the artistic part of this game is in fact 10/10 and the gameplay design was also juicy. However, the game as a whole does not deserve a score of 10/10 for 2 reasons. Lack of Achievements here in GOG version and bugs. Look, I'm the kind that doesn't care about bugs if it's not critical. But the map screen overlapped my game several times and I had to close and open the game to return to normal. My character also died after some key events and I missed progression made previously for no reason. There was also a moment in the flame section that one of the sounds simply entered loop. The technical side fell short of expectations.
I was a child from the 90's' who grew up watching arcades and watching Asterix & Obelix's animations/movies, I felt like a child again with this game. I understand perfectly perfectly that there are criticisms to be done in a possible in -depth analysis, I see that there is a certain repetition in combat, narrative limitation, etc. But I my heart speaks louder here, I can't agree with this tendency that all modern games need to be "complex". Asterix & Obelix has never been known to be a complex story, quite the opposite! It has always been a work focused on adventure and comedy. I particularly had tons of fun with this game, repetitive or not, I'm addicted to throwing Romans everywhere for no reason! So either I'm completely blinded by nostalgia (good job!👍), or other players did not understand the simplicity of mechanics.
I have mixed feelings about this game. While I thought the gameplay was great and the atmosphere was very dark, the navigation was terrible and it ruined my experience and my desire to eventually finish the game. I've never spent so much time lost on a map in an old-school FPS, and I don't mean that in a good way. The maps were WAY too big, some of them had huge sections that required night vision, and the game's night vision uses the same battery system as the Minimap, which is really bad, by the way.
The gameplay loop is unsustainable. It features a mediocre combat system that is unresponsive and unintuitive, with rigid controls/mechanics that are repeated over and over again. Now, regarding the RPG progression, it is simply useless. The progression system fails to add anything to the gameplay. Quite the opposite, the game gets progressively more difficult and our character seems to get weaker. I honestly don't know how they managed to do something so unbalanced with such small skill trees. If you're reading this, you have every right to think that I'm bad at this game because I don't understand the right way to play... And you're probably right, I'm bad at this game. However, if I couldn't understand the game's mechanics, that means there's a flaw in the game design. I only don't give this game the lowest score because the story was passable and the possibility of decisions that affected the plot made the narrative quite interesting at a certain point. The big problem with this game is that it proposes a mental challenge instead of a skill challenge. It challenges how long you as a player can put up with these horrible controls/mechanics.
Nostalgically speaking, I always fondly remember the first 3 MK titles. But even though I played MK4 very briefly back then, it's really an underappreciated gem. It simplified the combo systems of MK3 and improved the responsiveness of the commands making the game as a whole much more dynamic. It was a brilliant sequel, I had a lot of fun playing it again after so many years. Definitely Recommend!
Trilogy is my favorite Mortal Kombat game ever. I'm delighted that i can finally play this masterpiece on PC.
