Mortal Kombat 1 Khaos Reigns Story Review - A Komplete Waste Of Time
Reviewed On: Xbox Series X
Also On: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Nintendo Switch, PC
Genre: Fighting
Publisher: Warner Bros. Games
Developer: NetherRealm Studios
Release: September 24th, 2024
Rating: Mature
Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns expands Liu Kang’s New Era with a new story campaign and an all-new cinematic experience. Discover how Liu Kang rallies his champions and puts faith in his enemies as he battles the ruthless Titan Havik, who threatens to plunge the realms into khaos. If they fail, the New Era will be reduced to anarchy.
Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns is an expansion pack for Mortal Kombat 1 that includes the Khaos Reigns story expansion, six additional fighters, and one new Kameo fighter.
This pack released for $49.99 on most platforms, with the Nintendo Switch version costing $39.99.
I picked it up on sale through the Mortal Kombat 1: Definitive Edition Upgrade for $19.79 during a sale on June 22nd, 2025.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how much the expansion costs if you’re interested in the story expansion, because it is an uninspired, uninteresting, and repetitive mess that manages to make you feel like you’ve wasted your money—and, more importantly, your time.
Clocking in at around three hours, the story (if you want to call it that) focuses on Havik as a Titan of Time who has come to the current timeline in order to try and destroy order and spread anarchy—a word that he makes sure to say every time he speaks, just to really cement that he’s from the Chaosrealm.
A realm that has settlements and people living semi-normal lives with shops and such, despite them preaching anarchy—and Havik having an entire army… which requires order to run.
…but the realm looks kind of cool with floating paths and stuff, so take that, order!
Put aside the paradox of anarchy in general, and you’re still left with terrible writing that has every character making an awful quip between every single fight, and each cutscene filled with absolute nonsense that’s unimportant and clearly just filler to justify selling this entire package as a “story expansion.”
Mortal Kombat is one of my all-time favorite franchises, and I understand that cheesy dialogue is pretty par for the course—but in the case of Khaos Reigns, it’s not just cheesy; it’s bad. Really, REALLY bad.
To top it all off, there are four instances of fights where you go up against a fighter and their Kameo partner (the tag system introduced in Mortal Kombat 1, where you pick a backup character and tap a button to call them in to do a move before vanishing) and beat them—only for a short, worthless cutscene to play out where they end up challenging you again. Except this time, you have the honor of fighting the Kameo character as the main fighter, while the previous main fighter becomes the Kameo character.
Let me reiterate: this DLC is only about three hours long, and it costs $50 at full price on most platforms. NetherRealm Studios then has the audacity to pad this experience out by turning four fights into eight simply by swapping the two characters and making you fight them back-to-back.
It isn’t fun. It isn’t challenging. It isn’t cute.
To be blunt, it fucking sucks.
The only redeeming quality about this entire story mode is that the cinematics look pretty damn good in some places.
There’s a dragon that shows up about halfway through the DLC that looks absolutely incredible and serves as a highlight for the package, along with some really unique and beautiful-looking stages and environments.
But unfortunately, you have to wade through a constant barrage of terrible quips, meaningless dialogue, and boring fights to see these set pieces for just a few moments before you’re right back to basics.
While playing, I knew that if I stopped, I wouldn’t see it through to the end—and with such a short playtime, I at least wanted to try and fool myself into thinking I got my money’s worth.
As I played through the story expansion, I was already thinking about what I would rate this game, and I found myself constantly bouncing between one star (due to how bad it is) or two stars, simply to give credit to the cinematic pieces.
Yet as I’m sitting here writing this, I find myself instead settling on one star to highlight the cinematic pieces, because the rest of the story is so bad that it deserves nothing at all.
To be completely transparent, this review only focuses on the story mode content. I haven’t played as most of the characters included in the new Kombat Pack, nor did I try the new Kameo fighter. That’s mostly due to the fact that Mortal Kombat 1 just failed to hook me as much as previous entries in the franchise have.
Khaos Reigns helped ensure things stay this way by leading me to uninstall the entire game after the credits rolled.
Khaos Reigns is an overpriced and soulless story expansion that offers little to no value to fans of the franchise.
Terrible writing manages to make an interesting plot concept worse than bad by also making it boring and relying on cheap design tactics to pad the playtime.
My review scores often fall higher on the scale because I find it difficult to be motivated enough to cover negative experiences—but every once in a while, something so bad comes along that it actually manages to make me angry or frustrated that I spent my time with it at all.
Khaos Reigns achieves this feat and led to me uninstalling the entire game after credits rolled.
Outside of some visual flair during certain cinematics, Khaos Reigns serves as a piece of Mortal Kombat history that’s better left behind when the timeline inevitably resets itself again.