Mortal Kombat goes back to its roots with Mortal Kombat 1, a fresh reboot that delivers some of the most striking visuals seen from a fighting game to date. Lighting quality, materials across its detail-rich stages and motion capture are all brilliantly realised on Unreal Engine 4 here.
Mortal Kombat 1 - the Digital Foundry tech review. Every console is put through its paces by Tom Morgan, including the troubled Switch port. There's a lot to take in then. The question is, to what extent are these visual cutbacks are acceptable? And does it truly affect the Mortal Kombat experience? No doubt, the texture quality in certain stages - like the Hourglass - is glaringly low even for a Switch port. It's a distraction to see entire surfaces - rock formations, mosaic floors - appear as a blur, behind much more sharply defined characters.
Worse still, these 30fps scenes at times suffer from bouts of hitching as the level first loads. Again this applies to all three consoles, and interestingly, this half refresh allows each to push higher settings. All run at their maximum res targets during intro scenes for example: so 4K on PS5 and Series X, or 1440p on Series S. Also, depth of field, and camera-based motion blur engage in these moments. Plus, shadow maps are added in cutscenes for extra background detail.
The frame-rate on Switch is an uneven 30-60fps experience right now - and even under that figure during in-engine intros and fatalities. By comparison Switch runs at 65.5ms on average meanwhile, which on paper is respectably close. it's only seven milliseconds off the pace, as an average. However, he notes that there is a much wider distribution of readings on Switch, a range of around 40ms not seen on PS5. All of which means, from input to input, there's a more variable response level on the Nintendo release.