When Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection was announced, I was excited. It had been over a decade since the last time these games saw the light of day with the release of Mortal Kombat HD Kollection which I reviewed back in 2011, but those were problematic releases plagued with online latency, input delay, and poor sound emulation. This new collection was going to be done by Digital Eclipse who had just come off the fantastic Atari 50 and The Making of Karateka, both collections which I enjoyed and felt set a high bar as definitive collections for those respective set of games. This new collection includes the staples which have been previously released– Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the Arcade. But goes beyond previous collections by going deeper into the library and also includes hours of new documentary footage. There is a solid foundation here with the essential games that you would expect, and emulated at a much higher quality than previous releases. However, barebone launch features and missed opportunities hold it back compared to modern collections like Capcom Fighting Collection 2.
The following games which are what I would consider the core essentials that are included, and have been re-released in the past are:
- Mortal Kombat (Arcade)
- Mortal Kombat II (Arcade)
- Mortal Kombat 3 (Arcade)
- Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (Arcade)
On top of that, they’ve included highly requested/sought after games that haven’t had previous re-releases
- Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet (Arcade)
- Mortal Kombat Trilogy (PS1)
- Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (PS1)
- Mortal Kombat 4 (Arcade)
Beyond that they’ve also included several ports of MK1-UMK3 to 16-bit era consoles & handhelds (which are non-essential as the above versions are superior, but may be nostalgic for some players) as well as the excellent ports of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance to GBA. The much maligned Mortal Kombat: Special Forces also sees inclusion here.
I’ve spent by far the most time with the first two groups of games listed, and those will be the ones I mainly focus on for this review.
Offline emulation of MK1/MK2/UMK3 (Arcade) is generally solid. I have noticed at times that sounds can drop out when there’s lots of action, but this may have been the case in the original arcade releases as well. It’s neat that the ultra-rare Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet was also included in this package. Outside of the original arcade online functionality (which is non-functional in this release), this version includes the final balance changes that were made by Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon for Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. I am by no means a pro player– so these don’t mean as much to me as they would to someone who plays in more competitive circles.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy is both a favourite game of mine yet a frustrating one. Frustrating in that it always felt like a rush job and a little unfinished. In fact, in the documentary, John Tobias even mentions he was a little surprised on how the sales of Trilogy took off. There are a couple of improvements to Trilogy here– one is that Morph load times have been eliminated. The other known fix that has been included is that the Aggressor glitch (which randomly can enable the Aggressor buff for either player, even if it was disabled in options) has also been fixed, allowing MKT to play more like the Arcade versions of the games.
Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero is a game that I really wanted to play when it came out. Back then I only had access to a PC for playing games– and while MK1-4 all made an appearance on PC, Mythologies did not. So I do not know how my reaction to that game would’ve been had I played it when it came out. That being said, I find it borderline unplayable in 2025 due to the level of difficulty it has as compared to more modern games. While Digital Eclipse has added some options to boost the amount of health packs you have and given unlimited lives as well as added a Rewind option, I think an option to reduce damage enemies do to you by 60-80% would go a very long way to making this game much more playable.
Mortal Kombat 4 (Arcade) gets its first home release. It is impressive that this was included, as previously, this version of the game had not seen a re-release, and open source emulation (MAME) of the game has been imperfect. Digital Eclipse includes the ability to improve the resolution of the game by 2x or 4x, which allows you to either play the game as it was originally made, or clean things up and make it a little visually nicer to look at.
Every game gets a handful of options you can toggle. Most of the games, including all of the Arcade versions, allow you to turn off Blood and Violence (Fatalities/Finishing moves) which I appreciated as it let me play Mortal Kombat with my kids whom I otherwise would not be comfortable playing an M-rated game with. You can easily enable cheat menus, turn on unlimited fatality time, or instantly face secret characters among other options included.
Training modes are also included, which is great for getting proficient at executing combos. There also is an option to enable an On-Screen Move List which is a great option for playing with friends who are casual players, and don’t have every move memorized. Unfortunately, if you are Shang Tsung, there isn’t enough space to put all morph inputs on the screen, so you’ll have to go into the full Move List in the menu. Speaking of the Move List, for some reason, Combo strings are missing from the Move Lists for MK3, UMK3 & MK Trilogy.
One design choice that I was a little miffed about was the fact that you have to hold the Select button on your controller for 1.5 seconds to Pause the game. This gets annoying if you don’t want to keep an On-Screen Move List on the screen and just want to quickly look something up, or if you want to Pause and absorb what the input for a fatality is, as trying to do it in real-time is almost impossible with how quick the Fatality timer is on the games included in this collection compared to more modern MK games. I understand that certain games need the extra button– like the PlayStation ones. But they should have just made it instant on the games that don’t need the extra button and/or included a shortcut (press Start+Select together, etc) that allows you to instantly pause the game no matter the platform you are playing on.
There is also a Versus mode that is included that supposedly is supposed to speed up getting in and out of Versus games. It’s a nice idea, but its lacking a few options– for example, if you are doing pass & play between friends, and want to change control schemes between matches, you need to exit out of the Versus mode entirely to change the control scheme. This issue with changing control schemes also extends to the non-Versus mode, where there are too many button presses to get to where you can change the selected control scheme– its probably something that should be on the main pause screen, and only customization of the control schemes should be in a deeper menu.
As of the writing of this review, I was unable to play online as during the review period, I was never able to match up with anyone to play. Digital Eclipse has been advertising that the Online play features Rollback Netcode. We can only hope that it lives up to the claim. At launch, I can say that the online is extremely barebones which is disappointing. The only option is to randomly match up with someone via the Quick Match option. I think these days– private matches is almost expected at this point, and private rooms (where you can replicate the in-person arcade experience by having “winner stay on”) and cross-play are also strongly desired by the audience of most fighting games. Also as of writing of this review, Digital Eclipse has put up a FAQ about Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection where they do say that Private Matches/Rooms is under development with no timeline given.
Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection offers a CRT filter as an option for the Arcade & Console games, and an LCD filter as an option for the Handheld ones. However, I find the CRT filter isn’t great. There is excessive bloom (which washes out the image), and the filter tends to look blurry/low resolution. I find the best CRT filters out there (Retrotink 5x/4K, MisTeR project’s suite of customizable filters) generally look better than the default (and only) filter provided in the game. Expecting a retail game to offer the level of customization that niche products like the Retrotink or MisTeR do is unreasonable. However, I think we can compare this to something like the recent Capcom Collection releases (Capcom Fighting Collection 2, Marvel Fighting Collection), and see that Capcom understood that filters aren’t necessarily a one size fits all, and they offered many different styles of filters so that you can choose the one you prefer the most.
The interactive documentary included in the game is similar to what was done with Atari 50, where there is a timeline that has a combination of videos, pictures & games. The documentary was produced by Area 5 and has over 3 hours of content. As someone who is intimately familiar with the MK story, there weren’t too many completely brand new nuggets of information for me (the origins of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was probably the highlight of the content for me), and I wasn’t nearly as interested in the game industry talking heads they brought on to talk about Mortal Kombat that did not have any direct involvement in the making of the game, but at the same time understand why they were included (to give context for those who weren’t old enough/alive back when these games were coming out).
I do wonder if the scope of the project just was too unfocused, and if Digital Eclipse should have focused on the essential/most sought after versions of these games so they could focus their efforts on nailing the rest of the core experience of these games.
At the bare minimum, at least these venerable classics (particularly the arcade versions of MK1-4 as well as Mortal Kombat Trilogy & Mythologies) finally got well emulated re-releases. But there are things that probably should have been here at launch that are missing (like online private rooms/matches), and quality of life things that could be better (having to hold a button for 1.5 seconds to pause, lack of visual filter options, etc.). If you absolutely are a Mortal Kombat die hard, and you want easy access to play these games on modern consoles, or don’t mind only playing random online matches, this collection is for you. Otherwise, you may want to wait for the promised update and/or a sale before jumping in.
An Xbox Series X|S code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
