Expert Tips Mortal Kombat 11 Doesn't Tell You

While MK11's story mode is fantastic, it also happens to be quite short. About six hours after you hit that start button, you'll see the end credits, and that means you'll have to find some other fun in this game you paid 60 bucks for. Outside of the story, the best way to gain experience and rewards in the game is through the challenge towers. Mortal Kombat has two different tower modes: Klassic and Towers of Time. While Klassic — an offline mode with five increasingly tough towers — will get you currency and other rewards, you'll likely spend most of your time with the Towers of Time. Throughout these various Towers, some permanent and some revolving on timers, you'll find rare gear, complete challenges, and gain useable items called Konsumables.

Konsumables, which are, well, consumable items, are meant to be used in the Towers of Time. Often, these Towers feature fights with modifiers, making them tougher and often annoying. Some will have you pitted against a strong character like Kano and have a modifier that slowly poisons you, chipping away at your health bar during the match. To offset these modifiers, you should plan on using Konsumables that can help finish a fight faster. Many of these will give you a limited amount of armor, replenish your health, or provide guided projectiles (for example, missiles) that damage your opponent. Don't ignore Konsumables — you'll get a plethora of them, but you should definitely put them to use.

Who doesn't love Fatalities? It's highly doubtful that many players pick up MK games in spite of these glorious, gory finishing moves. They've been a staple of the series since its humble beginnings and have reached another level of ridiculousness in the NetherRealm era. Returning from Mortal Kombat X is the ability to unlock Easy Fatalities. Basically, the Easy versions of these finishers eliminate a lot of the conditions that are necessary for pulling them off. With the simple version, you can press one button combo, found in your move list, to execute your character's most brutal move.

There's one caveat about these shortcut moves, though: they require you to spend Easy Fatality Tokens to pull them off. To earn these, you need to spend Time Crystals, the game's premium currency, to unlock them. It's the era of microtransactions, and Mortal Kombat has certainly found its way into the fray. But, here's the thing: NetherRealm made the "normal" Fatalities easier in MK11 than it was in the previous game. Take a minute to learn these finishers for your favorite characters, and you'll never need to buy those tokens. In fact, take note of the previous tip and pin your Fatalities to your screen so you can practice them until your heart's content.

Remember the X-ray attacks from the last few games? This game features Krushing Blows, which are essentially cinematic animation-based moves that feature similar effects. When pulled off correctly, these moves deal significant damage, potentially shifting the course of a match. But what makes a Krushing Blow so rewarding is the fact that you have to meet certain, very specific criteria to have the ability to activate one. For example, Jax has one called the Double Heat Missile, which only triggers during a combo of six or more hits. It's a tricky move, one that requires quick thinking and even quicker fingers.

That's not all that makes them difficult to master. Even once you meet that criteria, you can only use a specific Krushing Blow once per match, and then it's locked until the fight is over. Because of this, you need to be strategic about when to utilize them, as they really can have a huge impact on your opponent. A Krushing Blow could be the difference between a win and a loss, but only if you connect at the right time. Learn the moves, the specific stipulations surrounding them, commit it all to memory, and then start to focus on the strategy behind them. Be stingy with your Krushing Blows and you'll get positive results.

Through character tutorials and story mode, you'll likely have a good idea of the fighters you like best after eight or ten hours. In past MK games, that simply meant that you'd memorize their movesets, pick those characters every time you reached the selection screen, and do your best to win as many matches as possible. But in MK11, there's so much more to the characters, and you can essentially customize them to your playstyle via the Kustomize menu.

This menu is dense, offering you the chance to build loadouts with different special moves, gear, and gear augments. If you have moves you like utilizing against specific opponents, build a loadout based on that. You can name them, so each one is easy to remember, and bring out whichever one you want in any mode that pits you against AI fighters. Take some time and customize your characters, especially if you plan on spending time grinding through the Towers of Time. You'll find that fights become much easier when you can base your strategy around a character loadout geared toward your style of play.

The grind in Mortal Kombat 11 can be tough. With various currencies — Soul Fragments, Hearts, Koins — keeping you from unlocking all those precious skins, gear, and augments found in the Krypt, you'll need to fight thousands of matches to even have a chance at getting everything you want for your favorite fighters. Luckily, you don't have to always have your hands on the controller to build up your currency stashes. In the Tower, you can utilize AI fighters to complete matches and challenges for you, essentially allowing you to focus on other, non-game-related things while the CPU farms for you.

To increase your Hearts — easily the most annoying currency because of the requirements to get it — you can set up your AI fighter to move through the Klassic Towers, completing matches and challenges along the way. If you focus on the Endless Tower specifically, your AI fighter can fight over and over while you work, cook dinner, or pay attention to your neglected significant other. All you have to do is press a couple of button prompts between each fight and everything will move right along. Pretty soon, your currency reserves will be full and you can head to the Krypt to unlock more chests.

Special move grabs can have a huge impact on Mortal Kombat 11 matches. They often do a large amount of damage and, if you're up against an opponent with slow reaction time, you can connect with them multiple times during a fight. Frankly, they're a great way to make short work of the easier Living Tower matches, so pay attention to that section in the tutorial and don't be stingy with the dedicated button on your controller. At their core, these grabs are fantastic moves that can shift momentum, but they actually work in more situations than you might expect.

Many Kombos you'll do during a fight can result in launching an opponent into the air. There are plenty of scenarios that can play out once that enemy is mid-air, but one you may not be aware of is that you can utilize most special move grabs to further the damage. While it doesn't necessarily make sense from a realism standpoint, you can send an opponent into the air and then use a grab before they have time to recover, essentially extending a combo in a devastating way. A special like Jax's Gotcha Grab is the perfect example of this, as it's a ground-based move, but can connect when juggling an adversary.

The tutorial teaches you so much about combos, especially when it comes to the Dial-a-Combo style of the game and the timing that can be involved in pulling them off successfully. However, if you're still struggling after hours and hours of practice, there are some settings that you can change to potentially help you improve your experience. A few settings can really affect the way you play, and they can all be found in the Controller Settings menu. By default, MK11 has Release Check toggled on. It's meant for joysticks and ensures that special moves will only activate after releasing all corresponding buttons. This can have a small but unfortunate effect on your success rate.

Input Window Timing is another major setting, as it has a huge impact on how long you have to dial in those combos. There are three available speeds (Long, Medium, Short) and it'll take some practice to find which one is ideal for your play style. Also look at Alternate Control, Button Shortcuts, and Input Shortcuts.Tweak the settings and then use your favorite character in practice to figure out how each of them impact your success.