As I mentioned in the Mortal Kombat Trilogy review, fighting games aren’t my kind of thing, so these will be opinions from someone who has no idea about balance or techniques. That said, Killer Instinct Gold feel much more like a home console game than the Mortal Kombat Trilogy, due to a few extra features.

The game has a nice look about it, with detailed sprites (based on really well made 3D models, like Donkey Kong Country) mixed with 3D arenas. It definitely feels like an N64 game, and the sprites somehow don’t look too out of place in the maps. I found the gameplay to be fun, even though I’m absolutely useless at it, this feels slightly friendlier to newcomers.

One welcome feature is the practice mode, which lets you browse through all the special moves and select one to pin to the screen. The bottom of the screen shows all your inputs to help remind you which button “FK” is. There are also training modes to go through specific abilities, including a “focused training” mode which adds a timer. It’s something that will likely be good for people who have the capabilities of having skill with these games.

Killer Instinct Gold still has a few oddities. There’s no mode in singleplayer where you can select a specific opponent, and map selection is done via cheat codes. Still, this seems to offer a lot more than Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

Fine

The initially complex combo linking system starts to wear thin after several weeks of constant hammering.

Marcus Hawkins, N64 Magazine #3. Review score: 62%

Remake or Remaster?

Its inclusion on Rare Replay is good enough – although it would be nice to have that package ported to more systems.

Official ways to get the game.

This is available via Rare Replay on Xbox One/Series.

Re-releases

2015: Rare Replay