Author: John Scalzo

Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon has been promising that the upcoming reboot would be a brutal and hardcore return to the franchise’s Mature-rated days. Today, the ESRB revealed that he has kept his promise by awarding Mortal Kombat an M For Mature.

The rating was handed out for “Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity and Strong Language,” which is about what you’d expect to see in a Mature-rated Mortal Kombat. Although the full Rating Summary makes it look like the kombatants will be allowed to swear for the first time:

This is a fighting game in which players engage in one-on-one battles against characters from the fantasy-based Mortal Kombat universe. Players compete in a series of combative rounds in order to advance to different matches throughout the game. Players use swords, guns, chains, spikes, and supernatural attacks (e.g., fire, ice, lightning) to defeat a cast of human-like characters.

After an opponent is defeated at the end of a match, players have the option to perform finishing moves called ‘Fatalities.’ Many of these finishing moves depict over-the-top instances of violence: impalement, bone-crushing body snaps, execution-style gunshots to the head; large blood-splatter effects occur during these sequences, staining characters’ bodies and the ground. Several of these exaggerated finishing moves depict characters getting dismembered, ripped or sliced in half, stabbed, set on fire, or set to explode. During the course of the game, female characters sometimes wear revealing outfits that expose large amounts of cleavage; one female fighter is depicted partially nude, covered by a costume of thin cloth strips. Language such as ‘f**k’ occasionally appears in the dialogue.

Mortal Kombat will be released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on April 19.