Mortal Kombat 11

You control one of two fighters facing off on a 2D plane, even though the characters and backgrounds are fully three-dimensional, and your job is to reduce the opponent's health bar to zero before they do the same to you. The controls use one stick or pad to move and block, and four attack buttons for different limbs, which combine into strings of moves you learn move by move, with a built-in practice mode that shows the exact inputs on screen. Your first ten minutes will likely be spent in that tutorial, which walks you through blocking, throwing, and your character's special moves like a projectile or a slide, before the story mode drops you into a series of cinematic fights against different characters.

Once you are past the basics, most of your time is spent either in the story mode, which plays like an interactive action movie about time travel gone wrong, or in towers of fights against the computer that reward currency and costume unlocks. Fights themselves get harder as you learn to read your opponent, since blocking too much lets them grab you and attacking too much leaves you open, and a meter builds up during the match that lets you spend it on a comeback move or a finishing fatality. A single story mode playthrough takes six to eight hours, while the fighting itself can be practiced for as long as you like.

Session to session it rewards repetition, since replaying the same match teaches you your opponent's patterns, and the fatalities, gruesome finishing moves shown after a win, are a spectacle even for people who do not care about competitive fighting. What may frustrate newcomers is that online opponents can be much better than you early on, and on Switch the picture is softer than other versions though it still runs smoothly. If you want a fighting game with an unusually good tutorial and a genuinely entertaining story to work through alone, this is a strong starting point.