A Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection review ► Ludology Now!

A few weeks ago I subscribed to MinnMax on Patreon (following my own advice from last week’s column on supporting independent game journalism) and, in return, I received a Steam key for Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection. Now, I hadn’t been planning on buying this collection, mostly because I already own every Mortal Kombat game in one form or another – including an arcade machine, which I’ve already spoken about at length.

SEE ALSO: My Mortal Kombat Arcade1UP Machine Brings The Whole Family Together ► Ludology Now!

Now, maybe this doesn’t translate in the age of online play, but when I first played Mortal Kombat in the early 1990s there were few people who were better than me. The only two people I knew who could hold their own in a fight were both three years older, and by the time Mortal Kombat 3 rolled around even they could not offer a challenge. I was the best person at Mortal Kombat 3 that I had ever met, and a part of me had internalized that as being one of the most skilled players ever.

In retrospect and under any conscious observation, obviously this was never true. I may have been the best Mortal Kombat player among my group of family and friends, but I probably wasn’t even the best Mortal Kombat player in Savannah, let alone the state of Georgia at large. Now, in 2026, using the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection to play the SNES version of Mortal Kombat 3 online, I must face the honest truth; I am not the best MK3 player anymore. I never was.

Playing old Mortal Kombat games online

It’s wild how good some of these online Mortal Kombat 3 and Mortal Kombat 2 players are. I can still hold my own a good 50% of the time in MK2, but once the run button gets introduced I am immediately outclassed. No one I ever knew, in arcades or at friend’s houses, ever used the run button in MK3 and UMK3 and MK4. Why would I need to build that skill?

Watching a random player juggle me using nothing but Reptile’s acid orbs, punching, and the run button was almost a spiritual experience. I can’t really describe it. I’ve watched lots of fighting game tournaments over the years, but those are always Street Fighter or Smash or some anime game I’ve never heard of. I’ve never seen professionals at this level play the Mortal Kombat games of my youth, and I was stunned. I was shocked. I was incredibly, immediately, impressed by how quickly I knew I would be outclassed.

What a feeling! Like having a master painter stand over my shoulder and guide my arm, showing me just how to brighten and darken my canvas to achieve the look I am desperately searching for. I hope everyone has the chance to experience something like that.

The collection of the MK Legacy Kollection

The amount of games on offer in the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is impressive. Not only does it include the console and arcade versions of Mortal Kombat, MK2, MK3, UMK3, MK Trilogy, and Mortal Kombat 4, it also includes Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, two games which many people heavily, heavily disliked at launch. I’m not one of those people; I’m a MK Mythologies defender. Yes, I am sane, why do you ask?

Mortal Kombat: Mythologies is not fun to play, I will readily admit. The controls are bad – there’s no other word for it. Even with the “modern” control options the MK Legacy Kollection offers, it’s a chore to play. But there was a time in my life where Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero was my favorite game. No one else understood the lore behind Shinnok’s amulet, no one else knew just what the first Sub-Zero sacrificed for the chance to appear in the tournament from the first game. In this game, you can canonically kill Scorpion for the very first time. In this game, you learn exactly how evil Quan Chi is far before the reveal in Scorpion’s MK4 ending. It’s also the first time you get to walk around inside the Netherealm, although it does not bear much resemblance to how the Netherealm looks in later entries in the series. It also has a giant robot fight.

The part that sucked

The Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection has one fatal flaw – the online networking is shaky and tenuous at best, occasionally horrible at worst. There weren’t enough players for me to relegate myself to only playing against other people on Steam, but turning on ‘Krossplay’ (the K’s aren’t cute anymore, are they?) brought lag, stuttering, and frequent, frustrating crashes. Sometimes these crashes took me all the way back to my desktop, sometimes the game simply froze and I had to ALT-TAB out, sometimes it just kicked me back to the main menu and I had to start the whole process over again. According to the game my own connection was fine, but I tried to have online matches with people multiple times over the course of the past week and the times when it worked flawlessly were far outweighed by the times I was annoyed and frustrated with connectivity issues.

Taken at face value as a collection of all the 2D (and a few janky attempts at 3D) Mortal Kombat games, it’s an incredible deal for people who don’t already own such things. There is also an impressive amount of music, art, behind-the-scenes content, and lore/story roundups for each game. Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3 in particular remain certified bangers, and it’s nice to jump back into MK4 every now and then to remind ourselves what a horrible time in gaming that was for any company trying to make 1v1 fighters. The online connectivity needs work, but I hear this is an issue with the FGC writ large. I don’t know, that’s not my department. I just like when the ninjas go punchy punchy spear kick fireball turn-into-a-moth-for-some-reason.