At the core basis of MKX its undeniably a fun and worthwhile experience, however the are many design choice that make it a missed opportunity. Just to get it out of the way, Im a huge Mortal Kombat fan and iv been playing the game for a long time, but this game has been a mixed bag in my opinion.
Fortunately the game gets the most important aspect right, the game play (kind of). Playing with your friends on a couch is incredibly fun and really cant be faulted, the same goes with people online who aren't deciding to use cheap tactics (which in my experience is a rarity). Unfortunately the same praise of fun cant be said about the AI in MKX, which to me feels terribly broken and cheap. the very easy and easy difficulty modes aren't worth playing even if you haven't grasped the basic concepts of the game. On the other hand however hard / very hard are extremely broken and almost unplayable. Instead of increasing the AI intelligence it goes the cheap route of artificial difficulty. Your opponent takes less damage and gives out more, as well as becoming faster all round and repeating the same moves. whilst this may be acceptable in other game genres, it has no place in what is supposed to be a balanced fighting game. On top of that 90% of the time your opponent will block your attack, no matter what they are doing at the time. but on the other hand they consistently land hits on you despite you holding the block button. it feels cheap and breaks all cohesion in the game. so in reality your left with fighting medium difficulty and human opponents, rendering a portion of your game useless.
Thankfully when things are balanced, the game is so much fun it can keep you entertained for hours, trying out the different characters and learning their variations and movesets. its especially gratifying to nail down a fighter and be able to pull off all the kombos, special moves, fatalities and brutalities. Its s a shame then that the roster doesn't seem as good as previous installments, while i appreciate the idea to include new characters (Cassie is now one of my favourite fighters), alot of them are boring to both fight with and in terms of thier character. Erron Black is a perfect example of this, he adds very little to the story or roster. But as we've seen the fighter roster has been hindered by the games marketing model......
DLC is ridiculous in this game, from first glance MKX seems like a platform to sell more DLC, hell half the title screen is taken up by advertisements for it! skins, easy fatalities, fight skips, characters, everything. I know these are optional but when Goro, a fan favourite fighter, and Tanya, who's already in the game! are locked behind pay walls it just shouts out dodgy practice. Another example of this is koins and the krpyt which were at one point earned alot faster.....until an option was put there to just buy everything instead making earning alot slower in an attempt to force you to part with rel money.
The graphics, sound and animations are all fantastic and for the most part character models and voice actors are excellent (though Sonya Blade clearly didnt get as much dev time). The story mode is somewhat entertaining but feels shallow compared to MK9 and doesnt really warrant a second playthrough. The living towers are hit and miss with some being extremely fun and other poorly though out, and the traditional towers can get a little repetitive.
In the end, whislt the fighting mechanics are top quality and the gameplay fun in the right circumstances, i cant shake the feeling of mistrust and poor difficulty progression that's present in the game. there seems to be alot of missed opportunities in MKX that make me long for the game that could have been.