I just don't understand how NRS can take something as exciting and timeless as a tag fighter and make it slow, predictable, boring and feel like garbage to play. Yet here we are, another year of the same formula in another attempt to dazzle casual players with admittedly high production quality and visuals, yet shockingly low playability. NRS follows the trend of stubbornly refusing to take from decades of better games in the genre to assist with their nonsensical gameplay design and appears to have really doubled down on trying to make this game as frustratingly counter intuitive to play as the last two. If you don't regularly play other fighting games, just move past this review and buy it because nothing I'm about to rant about matters to you. If you're dabbling in the genre and want to see if this is where you should start? Go purchase SF6 or any other game. This game will follow NRS history of no support and being abandoned after ~2 years. There's nothing here worth your time and investment. If you're a fighting game player wondering if you should check out MK1 instead of whatever game you're playing read on:

Pros:
- No restriction on AMBUSH assists, this is a great idea, calling assists mid animation like in a throw opens up tons of possibilities and is a great example of what can make these types of games great.
- Solid roster, there's a good mix of archetypes here, even a puppet character

Cons:
- Unfortunately pretty every thing else that is related to the core gameplay system. The method NRS uses here to read and dial up inputs is essentially a direct port of MK11. This ends up resulting in having to really slow down your thinking and reactions to match the speed of the game. There's a few points I want to cover that are directly related to this.
- Strings, this is a dial up game in that you will input any sequence prior to the execution of the sequence. This works in something like Tekken where movement is fluid and windows are large. In MK1 however, this functionally serves to limit the time in which reactionary offense can occur. You will not be hit confirming in this game mid string, you will also not be altering your inputs to react to uncommon situations, which is really self-defeating in a game with assists where player expression SHOULD be front in center of shifting offense and combo routes.
- Block button and down 1, This system is built entirely off of these two mechanics. You use a button to block in NRS games. That's fine but this is a universal left/right block effectively removing yet another use for assists. Additionally because there is no such thing as linking a normal in these games, and your buttons are so slow due to being components in a string, this results in a very slow "my turn - your turn" game pace. The strings in this game are built off the idea that down 1 will be your universal reversal to punish a string and take your turn back. However down 1 is unsafe on block. This results in collapsing the pressure in this game down to a few guesses, of which you need to make and input prior to having visual information of what's happening because you need to dial up your punish. It all feels like finger twister and is downright uncomfortable, and is really just unnecessary, just another barrier to converting your intentions to execution that feels designed by a committee of people who knew they had to make an MK game, but didn't understand what works in fighting games, so refuse to trim the fat from their system for the sake of making it "the thing that MK is".

I genuinely have never seen a series get such a free pass because most of the people who buy it and praise it are casually visiting the new MK and are not intending to stick around, They play this and assume that fighting games are tedious and annoying to play because this is all they've been exposed to. But those players COULD be fighting game players one day if NRS wasn't doing such a disservice by designing these clunky ass $70 animated films

I just don't understand how NRS can take something as exciting and timeless as a tag fighter and make it slow, predictable, boring and feel like garbage to play. Yet here we are, another year of the same formula in another attempt to dazzle casual players with admittedly high production quality and visuals, yet shockingly low playability. NRS follows the trend of stubbornly refusing to take from decades of better games in the genre to assist with their nonsensical gameplay design and appears to have really doubled down on trying to make this game as frustratingly counter intuitive to play as the last two. If you don't regularly play other fighting games, just move past this review and buy it because nothing I'm about to rant about matters to you. If you're dabbling in the genre and want to see if this is where you should start? Go purchase SF6 or any other game. This game will follow NRS history of no support and being abandoned after ~2 years. There's nothing here worth your time and investment. If you're a fighting game player wondering if you should check out MK1 instead of whatever game you're playing read on: Pros: - No restriction on AMBUSH assists, this is a great idea, calling assists mid animation like in a throw opens up tons of possibilities and is a great example of what can make these types of games great. - Solid roster, there's a good mix of archetypes here, even a puppet character Cons: - Unfortunately pretty every thing else that is related to the core gameplay system. The method NRS uses here to read and dial up inputs is essentially a direct port of MK11. This ends up resulting in having to really slow down your thinking and reactions to match the speed of the game. There's a few points I want to cover that are directly related to this. - Strings, this is a dial up game in that you will input any sequence prior to the execution of the sequence. This works in something like Tekken where movement is fluid and windows are large. In MK1 however, this functionally serves to limit the time in which reactionary offense can occur. You will not be hit confirming in this game mid string, you will also not be altering your inputs to react to uncommon situations, which is really self-defeating in a game with assists where player expression SHOULD be front in center of shifting offense and combo routes. - Block button and down 1, This system is built entirely off of these two mechanics. You use a button to block in NRS games. That's fine but this is a universal left/right block effectively removing yet another use for assists. Additionally because there is no such thing as linking a normal in these games, and your buttons are so slow due to being components in a string, this results in a very slow "my turn - your turn" game pace. The strings in this game are built off the idea that down 1 will be your universal reversal to punish a string and take your turn back. However down 1 is unsafe on block. This results in collapsing the pressure in this game down to a few guesses, of which you need to make and input prior to having visual information of what's happening because you need to dial up your punish. It all feels like finger twister and is downright uncomfortable, and is really just unnecessary, just another barrier to converting your intentions to execution that feels designed by a committee of people who knew they had to make an MK game, but didn't understand what works in fighting games, so refuse to trim the fat from their system for the sake of making it "the thing that MK is". I genuinely have never seen a series get such a free pass because most of the people who buy it and praise it are casually visiting the new MK and are not intending to stick around, They play this and assume that fighting games are tedious and annoying to play because this is all they've been exposed to. But those players COULD be fighting game players one day if NRS wasn't doing such a disservice by designing these clunky ass $70 animated films