I do have to ask, what exactly is the purpose of it being a board-game grid?
"You cannot enter this area without the key... oh but don't worry, the incredibly linear gameplay will ensure you do the get the key, so no intelligence required."
Shouldn't it be promoting a desire to go explore and
find the key, rather than "come back when you've completed the compulsory red lines that you cannot avoid completing if you want to progress further, in a purely linear manner." Seems to me like a way to absolutely minimize the gameplay as much as possible; in which case, why even have it? Without a doubt, I thought MK11's free-roaming Krypt you could explore was a thousand times better than this and seemed like the foundations for a cool new adventure mode. Obviously not.
They made these gorgeous maps, but you don't notice them because the camera's constantly turning around, you can't explore, there's no
thing or no
one to interact with so.... who cares? All maps are fundamentally the same, irrespective of any redesigns for each season, because you just look at blue lines, green lines and red lines, click the interact button and fight an annoying novelty asshole. That's all that matters. You don't care what that Sun Do temple looks like this season, what hybrid skin has been applied to your opponent since you'll never unlock them anyway, what animations were put into solving a terribly-illogical riddle (after googling it), whether the lighting is even the same as last season or can even tell whether the map has been changed in any way since last time because the camera keeps swooping around corners anyway. Was this pathway here last season?
"Who knows! Who cares? You never be able to tell anyway because the camera spins 4 times when you go round that corner!"
Playing Invasions has one single gameplay concern; "what do I unlock from this fight?"
95% of the time the answer is "nothing".
There are no puzzles (and no, those horrifically obtuse riddle battles don't count), no exploration, no lore, no story, no interesting gameplay, no real "fun" unless you like fighting cheesing assholes; it's just a grind to get mostly awful skins, or coins to unlock a different set of awful skins. Then once you complete it, you just sit on it for 5-6 weeks until the next season rolls round to hopefully have better skins to grind for than the last season. But they'll probably suck too. And once in a blue moon you'll get an annoying boss battle over which Liu Kang narrates "the Reptile from this timeline is a dick. He'll kill everyone unless you stop him being a dick." Then you beat him and Liu Kang goes "That Reptile was a dick, but you beat him and prevented him being a dick in our realm. Thank you for saving the timeline. But he may return to be a dick again."
MK11 may have been rather disgusting in its RNG lootbox mechanics, but the work-reward ratio seemed higher for genuinely desirable gear and skins. It played some very vicious FOMO hands, but I dunno, I guess I'm glad it had a pulse for constantly higher quality new content. MK1 plays down the FOMO, which is much more mentally healthy - "this'll be in the store for a week, not for a day... and it'll be back next month!" is an undoubtedly healthier model to adopt, except it's hindered by both massively higher prices and the fact it's mostly all crap. And the Invasions store is usually garbage too. I invested way too much time and money into MK11 customization, I concede that, but it helped me through a very bad time in my life and enjoyed many of the unlockables; I had so many customization variations that were totally mine, creating new outfits became a game unto itself for me and loved checking out other players' variants on the MK Fashion reddit. But whilst MK1 is maybe healthier in this regard, I regularly see its store/seasons content and go "naaah, can't be bothered. I hate the skin in the first place, why do I want it in purple and orange?"
If the gameplay's going to be this limited, they should have just stuck it all in towers, because fundamentally it's just Towers of Time, but far, far slower to navigate around. And whilst they've made many of the more annoying nodes optional (I do appreciate that though), it also means that the mop-up after killing the final boss is even more annoyingly slow. Because without a map, you have no idea if the green lines are taking you to the gated off rune areas (now accessible with your
other linearly-rewarded required key) or to that one unbearably annoying Survive node at the start of the map you decided to skip several days ago, because it's also impossible to remember the layout with the camera constantly twisting when you turn a corner.
