The newest in the series has become a bit of a meme, at least on the Nintendo Switch. It might be fixable… but don’t buy it just based on that possibility.

Mortal Kombat 1
(Rated R18 in Australia; M for Mature in ESRB countries; PEGI 18)
Nintendo Switch
Copy purchased (physical)

On Mastodon the other day (it’s a chill place! You should follow me, and also you should quit Twitter) I debated the merits of buying Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch, despite some pretty terrible early reviews.

In the end, despite having been burned before on unfinished releases, and specifically stating in as many words that I knew the game wasn’t great, I bought it anyway. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to follow your own advice.

So. Should you buy Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch?

Er… no. I wish I could recommend it, and it may become one of those games that becomes worthwhile once it’s had a few rounds of patches. Indeed, its predecessor, Mortal Kombat 11, is actually pretty good on the Switch once it’s been updated. After a ropey start, developers Shiver put in a bunch of work to keep MK11 working at a pretty brisk frame rate. But that was then, and this is now.

And right now, Mortal Kombat 1 is ROUGH. It’s really hard to recommend a game based on what it could become, if it gets patched. Occasionally you get an MK11 out of such a recommendation, but more often than not you get a Fallout 76, plagued by bad design decisions, crashes, bugs, and endless glitches.

Make no mistake; there are plenty of graphical glitches. Let’s start with the harmless stuff: the character models and costumes aren’t quite as elegant as in other versions, with tassels and tails clipping through each other, and textures often failing to load. Frequently the character models and costumes will warp abnormally, as if you’re playing with dressed-up Stretch Armstrong figures; this seemed to come up most often with Sub-Zero.

This doesn’t appear to be simply on the Switch version, as there are reports of the PS5 version doing the same thing.

Brutalities often result in the slain character’s head floating in mid-air; I was able to consistently reproduce this bug with the Klassic Brutality (uppercut to finish the match), and with every character. Occasionally gravity would assert itself, but this was very much the exception.

These can be amusing, but there are uglier issues to deal with including textures not loading in- a problem also seen in other Switch games using Unreal Engine (it’s pretty frequent in Fortnite, for example). This can be forgiven on fast-moving character models, but in backgrounds and scenery it’s pretty glaring, as in this screenshot from The Hourglass stage. (Click for 1080p version.)

If you just put your Switch to sleep and move between MK1 and other games, you might run into the issue in the first panel above. WB Games recommends a full reboot of the system– hold down the Power button, choose Power Options, Power Off, and wait a moment before restarting- and this did improve performance and stability. Whether this is good enough is another question; the Hourglass stage in particular still seems to struggle to load in all its textures during fights.

Loading times in general are a problem for MK1 as well. Even using the reboot advice from WB Games’ support site, it takes 43 seconds to get to the game’s title screen, and another 32 seconds to bring up the main menu. Just setting up a local 1v1 match results in over 50 seconds of loading time (measured from the announcement of the level, to actual gameplay).

There might be something to Netherrealm’s decision to only bring the game to the newer Xbox and Playstation platforms; the big consoles’ SSD storage means matches start far more quickly. Even in the best-case scenarios using brand-new UHS SD cards, they are around 24 times slower than SSD speeds. And you can’t use the Switch’s internal storage to try and speed things up, because MK1 simply doesn’t fit unless you have a new OLED model with the additional storage; on my system it uses 29.4 Gb of space, and the eShop recommends 35.3 Gb of space be available for installation. That’s before the release of the DLC “Kombat Pack” add-ons. You can pre-order those now, if you want. (Don’t do that.)

Even after WB’s reboot advice, stability and performance are a problem. I did try one online game in ranked multiplayer (“Kombat League”). It took about a minute to get into a game, and I won two matches… not bad, until I pulled off a Brutality in the second match and the game hard crashed to the Switch’s home screen. And Kombat League encounters are best-of-five, so I technically couldn’t even get through one online matchup without the game crashing. (If your Switch Online username is NiteTerror, sorry about that.)

I also had a hard crash playing a Tower, and on two separate occasions I could complete a Tower but the game would hang without progressing (the Tower screen’s background was visible and music continued to play, but the results screen would never appear). I’ve also had two occasions where eventually you could mash buttons to advance to the results screen (or the main menu) but no indication appears on screen that you even can advance without rebooting.

With WB Games’ advice the game might no longer crash (or at least, it might crash less), but performance still needs work. The story mode visuals are all pre-rendered, which looks jarring when the game moves from 1080p movies pre-rendered on the ‘big’ consoles, into the 720p Switch display mode. Complex animation sequences (such as the Fatal Blows, and the sequence at the end of the Kombat Towers which is done in-engine) often hitch and lag behind the sound effects, and this can throw off your timing if trying to string together combos. Periodically during story mode the game would slow to nearly half speed while some process was completed in the background. And even during the pre-rendered visuals, the game stutters and there is visible screen tearing as it unloads assets and brings in the next level in the background.

And after all that, it’s not even feature-complete. Whatever criticisms you had of MK11, it was at least feature-complete with the big consoles- it had all the game modes, all the unlockables, and even had the link with Mortal Kombat Mobile to unlock Kronika as an announcer. (Presumably it needed to be complete so that WB Games could sell the DLC, but either way, the work is appreciated.) But MK1 is missing most of the much-hyped Invasion mode; after completing Cage’s Mansion, you just get a “To be continued” message, and the additional levels in the other versions are not yet present on the Switch. This also renders some of the weekly quests in the game impossible, because they are dependent on events that only occur in Invasion. (And yes, there are time-limited events and time-limited items in the real-money DLC shop, because this is 2023 and every game must now be like Fortnite.)

So the question on whether you stump up the cash for Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch is… well, it’s pretty easy to answer. Unless you’re already committed to the Switch version for some reason, definitely wait and see if the upcoming patches improve things. Don’t buy games now on the promise they’ll become good later; WB Games might have done a pretty good job on MK11, but they haven’t always had that reputation.

Even if you were looking to buy a portable MK1 for practice while you’re away from your main platforms, the stutters and performance issues make the Switch version a non-starter.

If you can buy the game on another platform, the Steam, Xbox Series X/S and Playstation 5 versions are streets ahead of the Switch versions; those are receiving far more favourable reviews and are probably the versions to go for if you’re into the series. For the same price, Switch owners should be getting at least the same stability and the same feature set. Right now, that just isn’t the case.

This article is current up to Mortal Kombat 1, version 1.3 on the Switch. Screenshots were taken using the Switch’s inbuilt Capture function, unless otherwise noted.