Mortal Kombat 4 - Reception

Reception

In October 1998, Midway announced the home venues revenues thanks to the release of various titles including Mortal Kombat 4. Mortal Kombat 4 was ranked having the 3rd best Game Over screen of all time. It was only behind Street Fighter II's and Super Mario Bros.'s Game Overs who placed second and first, respectively. Upon the start of the arcade's road tour, news programs commented on the violence from the game and expressed worries on how it would affect the players' personalities; Ed Boon replied that there were already more violent games than Mortal Kombat 4 and that the only reason that it was cited is that it is the most popular violent game.

GameRankings had an average of 76.07% from 20 reviews for the Nintendo 64 version of the game. The PlayStation and PC ports received smaller averages with the PS having 75.75% with 16 reviews, and the PC 72.14% with 14 reviews. The game has received positive response due to the new 3D graphics, the improvement of combos, and how all the characters "are still as cheesy as ever" and that they still have their original movements with a few updates. Although various reviewers did not find it more entertaining than previous games, they still praised the gameplay. On the other hand, the gameplay was commented to very similar to the previous Mortal Kombat titles. The Nintendo 64 port received positive response for being faithful to the arcade version with GameSpot giving it a "Great" 8.9 and IGN a "Great 8.8", though they noted that the graphics were not as good as the ones from the arcade. Despite receiving a little lower scores from critics, the PlayStation and PC ports have been commented to have improvements over the arcade game and the N64 port such as having more responsive controls or the FMV scenes which were not in the others. However, IGN mentioned that playing the PC port would become "stale" unless the player "had an extra pad and a friend". In retrospective, GamesRadar criticized the endings for the Nintendo 64 version of the game using a compilation from them for an April Fool joke, labelling them as hilarious due to their poor quality.

The Game Boy Color version received only an average of 46.00% with 3 reviews by GameRankings. It received poor reviews from publications such as GameSpot whose editor Jeff Gerstmann gave it a 3.5 out of 10 due to how different the game is from the other ports and how unresponsive the controls are. Similarly IGN's Peer Schneider criticized how limited the gameplay had become in the Game Boy Color and that defeating the opponent was relatively easier. He gave the game a "Poor" 4.0 out of 10. The Official UK PlayStation Magazine said that the game was "the same old stuff trotted out with a fresh coat of pixels. Tedious."