I'm a little late to the party here - both of these games have been out for a long time now. But after how much I loved the original Injustice: Gods Among Us, I had to post something about Injustice 2, if only to complain about the gear system.
But let's start with Mortal Kombat X. It's more of the same, but it's impressive how it takes advantage of the newer consoles to realistically render gore. The fatalities are absolutely sick now, and much more organic looking than the static fatalities in the older games. Brains and hearts and tongues now look like separately-rendered objects, and they look fantastic. Some of the fatalities and X-ray moves are very clever; I especially like Cassie Cage's "selfie" fatality.
I love the guest stars - the DLC characters from horror movies. Jason, Leatherface, Alien, and Predator are excellent additions, though I miss Freddy Krueger from MK9. It would have been nice to be able to pit Jason vs Freddy. And so it occurs to me that what I really wish they'd do is an all-horror game. I'd rather have that than an MK11, really.
My Dream Horror Fighting Game:
1. Start with the MKX engine, including fatalities, X-ray moves, and so on.
2. Use every horror guest star they've used before: Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Alien, and Predator.
3. Get the rights to every additional horror movie villain they can get, like Michael Myers, Chucky and Pinhead. Don't forget classics like Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy.
4. Add a few horror heroes like Ash Williams, Buffy Summers, or Ellen Ripley. Maybe even some meta icons like Elvira or the Cryptkeeper.
5. Design a few original monsters to fill out the roster, and have a couple of MK characters be the DLC guest stars this time.
6. Skins, skins, skins! Original and reboot versions of each famous villain. There's probably a dozen versions of Jason they could tap for inspiration.
I would play the hell out of that. Okay, so getting all those rights could make the game cost more than it's worth, I don't know. MK is owned by Warner Bros, so that should give them access to a couple of them.
Now, about Injustice 2...
I love the graphics. I love some of the new characters, especially Supergirl. The multiverse events are kind of neat, much better than the first one's STAR Labs crap. Beyond that, I liked the first Injustice better. The difference? Skins and levels.
They released a ton of skins for Injustice 1. Neat stuff like a TV-inspired Arrow, classic Harley Quinn, Killing Joke Joker, anime-inspired Catwoman, and so on. Injustice 2 has a few "Premium Skins", but not nearly enough. Instead they concentrated on the new gear system.
At first, the gear system sounds really cool. You get gear from winning matches and earning virtual "blind boxes" from multiverse events. This gear alters both your appearance and your stats. You can use these to create custom characters. It's fun to mix and match different heads, torsos, legs, and other parts to create unique looks for your favorite heroes. You can even change the colors.
The problem, of course, is that the gear changes your stats. So you're probably just going to use gear with the best stats, which keeps you from having the look you want. If you have a favorite piece of cool-looking gear and want to give it better stats, there is a way to do that, but it costs in-game resources.
Wearing powerful gear and leveling up your character only makes sense for the single player mode. If you're playing against another human, you're going to want the game to be as fair as possible. The basic versus mode gives players unfair advantages over each other, by letting level 30 characters fight level 1 characters, and letting you choose powerful gear loadouts.
This is a fighting game! It's a genre that usually puts a lot of stress on balance. Most fighting games put hundreds of hours into their playtesting just to keep any characters from being more powerful than the others. These games are constantly updated for balance purposes, and certain characters are banned from tournaments for being too powerful. Injustice 2 throws that concept out the window.
The good news there's a "Tournament" mode, which is a versus mode that keeps things even. The down side is that you can't use your gear loadouts, even for cosmetic purposes (I think there's a way around this by adding match rules, but it's a hassle). You can use the Premium Skins in the Tournment mode, but again there aren't very many of them. I tend to play the same characters a lot, so I'm a big fan of skins to break up the monotony.
So the biggest problems I have with Injustice 2 could be fixed with a few minor updates. Unfortunately they're done updating Injustice 2, and they're probably
already working on MK11. But Injustice 2 is so close to being the
perfect fighting game for me, it drives me crazy that it fell short.
My Dream DC Fighting Game:
1. Start with Injustice 2.
2. Make more premium skins. The Injustice 2 mobile app has tons of cool skins in it, and if all they did was import all of those, I would be satisfied. Importing the ones from Injustice 1 would be cool too. I would also like it if Green Lantern had more GL Corps members as skins.
3. Make the default Versus Mode more like the tournament mode, in that all characters are the same level. Let us still use gear loadouts, but make them cosmetic only. The current Versus Mode can still be there as an option, but the default should be the most balanced version. That's what Versus Modes are for.
4. Bring in some (if not all) of the missing characters from Injustice 1, specifically Hawkgirl, Zatana, Batgirl, and Lobo. I like it when a fighting game makes the older games in the series obsolete. Some of the later Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games did a great job in making sure they included nearly every character from the previous games.
That's really about it. Basically, if you could just combine Injustice 1, 2, and the mobile app into a single game, it would be a few tweaks away from being my all-time favorite fighting game. In its current form, it's just okay.
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