Mortal Kombat 11 announced for April 23, 2019

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On December 6, 2018, during The Game Awards, NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced Mortal Kombat 11. The trailer was brutal, as the series has always been, and already came with a date: April 23, 2019, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One.

Watch the announcement trailer:

The game arrived as the successor to 2015’s Mortal Kombat X and kept the partnership between NetherRealm, Ed Boon’s studio, and Warner. Having the Switch version confirmed from the announcement was also a sign that the series wanted to be on all platforms on the same day.

For fighting game fans, an announcement like this calls for calm. A trailer shows violence and spectacle, and Mortal Kombat has delivered that since the 1990s. What defines a fighting game, though, is something else: the rhythm, the frames of each move, the punishes and the balance of the roster. That is only discovered with a controller in hand, after many hours in training mode. Until then, observe, breathe and wait.

What came next

In the following months, NetherRealm detailed the changes. Fatal Blows, special moves unlocked when health drops below 30%, and Krushing Blows, critical hits with graphic effects, changed the way a fight could be turned around. Customization also became more flexible than the fixed variations of the previous game: moves and looks could now be adjusted separately. The story revolved around Kronika, an entity that manipulates time to rewrite the past.

Mortal Kombat 11 launched on schedule and received Metacritic scores between 78 and 86 depending on the platform, with praise for combat and story mode and criticism of microtransactions and excessive grind. It passed 15 million copies by 2022, the series’ biggest sales hit. The Aftermath expansion followed in May 2020, and the Ultimate edition in November 2020, with guests such as the Terminator, the Joker and Rambo. Its successor, Mortal Kombat 1, rebooted the series in September 2023.

Source: NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.