Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch is a mess

Mortal Kombat 1 caused a stir when NetherRealm announced the platforms on which it would be released. The previous generation was completely skipped, and it was instead made available only for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S... and Nintendo Switch. It was evidently too powerful for the PS4 and Xbox One but just right for the Switch. Now that Mortal Kombat 1 is playable for everyone with a Premium Edition, we can put it to the test ourselves.

As many of us expected, the results are not great. Although it's impressive that it runs at all - and apparently does a good job maintaining a stable frame rate - the graphical compromises are alarming. In some instances, it looks noticeably worse than the Switch port of Mortal Kombat 11 and even previous Mortal Kombat games on older Nintendo platforms. And that's not even mentioning the numerous glitches and bugs.

The most striking issue on the Switch is the visual effects. Describing it as a downgrade from the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions wouldn't do it justice - it's really rough. While we all knew it wouldn't look as good as its Sony and Microsoft counterparts, few expected the changes to be so drastic.

It gets even worse when you see it in motion, especially the pre-fight animations. During actual gameplay, the low-quality character models are less noticeable, but when they get up close to you... yeah, it's pretty scary. And even the Fatalities aren't much better, as you can see in the following video.

Perhaps all of this could be forgiven if the combat system wasn't affected. After all, that's what a fighting game is all about, and nothing is more frustrating than input delays while trying to execute combos. Actually, that's not true because Mortal Kombat 1 has found something infinitely more frustrating: your opponent simply walks through the stage, making it impossible to land a hit.

Considering all of this, it's quite perplexing that the game was even released on the Switch. At the very least, it's surprising that NetherRealm was so eager to bring it to the Switch simultaneously with the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, as such ports are often delayed due to the platform's technical limitations. It remains to be seen if much will be done to address these complaints, but it could be that these compromises were necessary to get it running on the Switch at all.