PlayStation Plus subscribers were granted exclusive access to the Mortal Kombat demo on 8 March, with the rest of the PS3 community having to wait a full week before they could share in the spoils. Weighing in at only 572MB, it’s one of those demos which are so good that you’ll be showcasing it to all your friends when they come over, despite it being just a teaser for the real deal.

You can play the demo on your lonesome or go head-to-head with a friend using a second controller. It even has 3D support for those of you who’ve invested in stereoscopic TV technology. There’s only one mode to select in this sample, but the developers have been generous by giving you four characters to try out, each seemingly having a full move set. The mode is called Ladder and completing it involves beating 10 increasingly difficult enemies. In the demo you only get to play the first four tiers before a trailer for the finished game interrupts your progress. Not that this is an issue, because the trailer is enough to get even the most jaded fighting fan shaking their head in disbelief.

What impressed me most about the trailer was seeing some of the character-specific special moves. These are sure to mix things up nicely during gameplay, and prevent you from using the same approach against every enemy. Some enemies might fire projectiles at you while others might warp behind you and perform a combo attack before you’ve even had a chance to counterattack. Online matches are going to be fascinating contests due to the huge range of varied special attacks on offer. I hope there’s some sort of spectator mode included in the finished game, because it’s going to be really entertaining watching how other players attack with their character’s special attacks and how they defend those of their opponent.

The demo allows you to play as Scorpion, Johnny Cage, Mileena or Sub-Zero in two series-familiar locales – ‘The Pit’ and ‘The Living Forest.’ Unfortunately there is only one outfit per character in this sample, and even if you face off against the same character you’ll both be wearing identical gear. There are slots for 26 characters in total, as well as a further 2 DLC kombatants. The final game is likely to have an awesome roster of series regulars (such as Raiden) and newcomers alike. Fans of the original Mortal Kombat games are in for a real treat when they see how much more realistic, stylish and fluid the old characters and stages look. I remember playing a Game Boy version of MK back in 1996 and loving the experience even then. Getting your hands on a PS3 controller and launching into this demo is enough to make you marvel at just how far the series has come over the years thanks to the exponentially more powerful systems we have in our homes (and hands) these days.

Mortal Kombat’s demo has five different difficulty settings and you can set the round count between 1 and 5. Once you’re in a match you can pull up the moves list for your character and cycle between ‘basic attacks,’ ‘combo attacks,’ ‘special attacks,’ ‘enhanced attacks’ and ‘finishing moves’. There are two fatalities per character at the moment, but I’m unsure whether or not we can expect more in the final version. Mortal Kombat is very rewarding for newcomers to the fighting genre because the moves are fairly simple to perform. Most of the special moves (such as Scorpion’s “get over here” attack) only require 2 directions and 1 face button to be entered in sequence, and finishing moves require 4 directions and 1 face button to pull off. Hardly challenging stuff. The challenge is going to come in when you’re trying to dodge your enemy’s attacks while simultaneously going on the offensive. I appreciate the simplicity of the move inputs because this way it takes less time to perform special moves and you can concentrate more on strategy rather than trying to recall long sequences of button presses.

Mortal Kombat shares quite a few similarities with Street Fighter 4. The controls are super responsive and your character jumps in a similarly superhuman way. It’s easy to jump over your opponent and some characters like Scorpion can even perform grabs/throws on an airborne enemy. There’s also a bar in the bottom left-hand corner which is divided into three segments and fills up when you successfully perform attacks on your opponent. With one segment full you can enhance your special attacks by holding down R2 when you press the last button in the move sequence. With the bar full you can perform an X-Ray attack by pressing L2 and R2 together. Provided your opponent doesn’t block or evade it, this attack causes a great deal of damage and showcases the intense level of graphical gore to be found in this game. The slow motion camera zooms up on the fighters and you see an internal view of their muscles, organs and bones as these are torn, broken, pierced and skewered. Definitely not enjoyable viewing for the squeamish among you. Obviously the fatalities are similarly grisly, with a lot of slicing and dicing of human limbs entering the equation during them.

I must also remind readers that gameplay in Mortal Kombat only operates on a 2D plane, so there is no sidestepping ability like you find in Soul Calibur or Tekken. You certainly don’t miss this feature when you’re enjoying all the fast paced action MK serves up, and I for one am glad they left it out.

So what about the graphics in Mortal Kombat? From what I can tell, Mortal Kombat uses a refined version of the Unreal engine and the developers did some great texturing, modeling and animation work to bring us one amazing looking game. The PS3 exclusive character Kratos certainly doesn’t look as good as he did in God of War III (judging by his appearance in the trailer), but then again this is a multiplatform game which needs to take advantage of the Xbox 360’s hardware as well. In the demo the stages loaded within seconds, and the framerate was smooth for the most part. The environments are packed with various macabre elements like crows feasting on human flesh, and the moody lighting in each stage is superb. The characters’ animations have an excellent fluidity about them. For example, their limbs realistically flail when they get launched into the air by an uppercut or they stumble after being firmly kicked in the jaw. It would seem there is an impressive physics system underlying all these animations, and it really goes a long way towards making combat feel more visceral. Characters also show damage as the fight progresses, and it’s not unusual to have part of your brain showing or a trident lodged in your back at the end of a round. Mortal Kombat is definitely in a class of its own when it comes to persistent gore.

If you have a PS3 then you need to experience this spectacularly visceral demo for yourself. It will become available to non Playstation Plus members from the 15 March in North America and 16 March in European territories. Xbox Live members will also be getting it at a “later date.” Mortal Kombat will be out on 19 April in North America and 21 April in the UK.

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