Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection - Switch 2 Review

It is 1995. I'm five years old on Christmas night and I'm playing Mortal Kombat 3 Ultimate for the SNES. A warm, summer evening breeze filters through the air and mingles with the bitcrushed music and sounds of digitised sprites beating the crap out of each other. Every fight feels novel, each special move a discovery, and the virtual ultraviolence feels like it awakens my young, impressionable mind up to the wonderful vistas of death in media as entertainment. My horror predilections would not be far behind. I take another sip of some 90s full-sugar coke and my youthful metabolism takes it like a champ. Life is good. And now, it is 2025. I'm thirty-five years old and playing Mortal Kombat 3 Ultimate for the SNES… As part of the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection for the Nintendo Switch 2. 

An oppressive heat swelters around the house as the entire Earth is slowly cooked by a future that the Jetsons most certainly did not promise, on a handheld device not even Back to the Future imagined, which is itself a vehicle for repackaging my childhood and selling it back to me. I'm struggling with the glitchy emulator and rapidly losing interest in a nostalgic revisitation, wondering why this Kollection was so half-assed in some areas and not in others. I take a sip of water because my body would regret anything else and groan at how this is not how I imagined my life ending up.

The Good

There was clearly a lot of thought put into some of this Kollection. Yes, I'm going to keep spelling it with a “K.” For a start, it's not just whatever is considered the “best” version of each game that's thrown into a bundle, but basically every version of those games. Mortal Kombat 1 (not that one) through Mortal Kombat 4 have their respective console and arcade versions included. So, for instance, if your childhood was so poisoned that nostalgia drives you to play the Master System versions of the first three Mortal Kombat games, the Legacy Kollection has your awful tastes covered.

The Krypt also boasts some of the neat bells and whistles you’d associate with something that’s supposed to represent “a look back” on the series’ origins. Things like a character bio section that’s displayed like a character select screen, with the fighter model updating to reflect which game you’re currently reading about. There’s also a documentary about the series’ development during the arcade heyday, split into parts and spread across the Krypt menu for that section, in what comprises at least a few hours’ worth of content. If you’re the kind of fan that wants to dig into everything they can about the series, then this alone might make it worth the purchase, as, for reasons we’ll get into, it’s probably the part of the Kollection that holds up the best. 

It's also neat to see some of the “oddities” of Mortal Kombat included, like Special Forces or Mythologies, the latter of which still amazes me with its existence to this day. They're not “good,” to be clear, but through a certain lens, I would call them fun. And given this Kollection seems very much like it's focusing on nostalgia, their inclusion seems almost essential. There are other games I would have liked to see included but… Well, we'll get to that. 

I would rate the way this bundle functions as a collection to be fine. Accessing and switching between the games themselves is quite easy to do, with consistent menus and UI across the board in that respect. I also didn't have any problems with the software crashing, long load times (outside of Mythologies but I think the game is just “Like That”), or anything else you might associate with a poorly assembled game collection. While they're limited, and we'll get into the details of that shortly, the Kollection does also have some emulation tools available. They could not be present at all, and I have seen collections of older games like that, so I'd still count it as a plus that they're here.

TL;DR

• Decent range of games, alternates included
• Switching between games is simple
• Save states and rewind
• A historic look-back on the series in its heyday
• I mean, it's still Mortal Kombat

The Bad

In full disclosure, I began playing this for review on Christmas Eve 2025, so the game had already been out for some time. I tend to go into anything I review as blind as possible, lest my thoughts be influenced by the negativity of others; I can generate enough on my own. We received a code for review and those are still downloaded through the store so, presumably, what I pulled down is what would have been available to anyone else.

So, with that in mind, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way – the Switch versions of the Kollection, both 1 and 2, were released “incomplete”. The carts don't have Mortal Kombat 4, Mortal Kombat Advance, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, and Mortal Kombat Tournament Edition, and somehow this even affected my digital download. It wasn't until a subsequent update that the missing games were restored, which is good, but it's unfortunate for anyone that collects physical media.

On that note, the games aren't true ports but are very clearly just emulations, with their presentation and quality lacking in a lot of areas. There's only one save state per game, for example, which for the arcade-style games is fine but is a huge pain for Mythologies and Special Forces. The menus, UI, and overall presentation style of the game just lack flair, especially for a series of Mortal Kombat’s calibre and reputation. It really shouldn’t have been difficult, for example, to be able to filter by individual titles. Instead, it only lets you filter by format and browsing through the games is a mess. I said switching between them was easy enough, but I didn’t say it was good.

A particular bugbear for me in this regard was the rewind functionality only covering about 30 seconds from the initial use. There are going to be two major uses for the rewind function built into each game’s emulation: going back a few seconds to correct a momentary mistake in a fight or going back to the beginning of a fight entirely. The latter is greatly frustrated by the short time available, which also makes it less useful for the adventure games, and the former is just kind of a scummy use of the feature that doesn't feel good to play, in this reviewer's opinion. So, really, the feature is just kind of useless in its current implementation.

There are technical problems that are just weird, especially if you're familiar with the original versions of each game. Mortal Kombat 3 Ultimate, for example, already had a punishingly short period for fatalities: just a few seconds and requiring players to be precise with both input and distance. I knew this. I was prepared for it. I was not prepared to, at least half the time, have opponents instantly fall over dead before “FINISH HIM!” had even finished being called. There were a bunch of small issues like these I noticed during my time with the Kollection, from input lag to sound glitching, and they're likely down to emulation problems that I know can be smoothed out on modern technology because I've seen it done in other, better software.

TL;DR

• Feature incomplete on cart without day 1 patch
• Technical problems typical of poor emulation
• Limited emulation tools
• Low-quality presentation style

Final Score: 6/10

As far as collections go, the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is rather mid. From bog-standard, poorly tuned emulation in place of actual ports and all the problems that go with that, to a lack of style in the UI and menus, and low-quality presentation overall. If you have no other way of playing these titles, then it likely isn’t the absolute worst way you could play them, but the Mortal Kombat series’ reputation and, dare I say, legacy deserve better than this.

Thank you for checking out our Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection Switch 2 review, thank you to Digital Eclipse (via Five Star Games) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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