When NetherRealm Studios unveiled Mortal Kombat 11 last week, the game’s brand-new character, Geras, might have looked like a fairly standard grappler. He’s armed with a few familiar Mortal Kombat-style teleportation and freeze moves, plus the ability to manipulate stone and sand. But Geras is easily the game’s most intriguing character, thanks to his ability to manipulate time — including the power to influence the in-game timer.
One of Geras’ abilities is called Lost Time and Spare Time. It consists of two moves: Lost Time, which subtracts up to 30 seconds from the clock, and Spare Time, which adds 30 seconds to the clock. Lost Time has some restrictions, naturally. Geras can’t remove the final nine seconds of the match, even if the timer is already under 30 seconds.
Lost Time and Spare Time costs two ability slots (out of three total) in a customized character loadout, meaning that NetherRealm considers the moves to be pretty powerful. Those timer-manipulating moves can’t be paired with some of Geras’ other high-powered moves, like Reawakened, which resurrects him when his life bar is drained and takes two ability slots; and Rewind Time, which takes three slots and behaves like Tracer’s Recall ability from Overwatch. Geras’ Rewind Time move takes him back in time four seconds, both in terms of his position and health, as seen in his reveal trailer.
Streamer and fighting game commentator David “UltraDavid” Graham explored how Geras’ abilities work — and the intriguing ways they can work together — in a 20-minute video captured at last week’s Mortal Kombat 11 reveal event. In it, Graham explores some of the fascinating and potentially maddening ways in which Geras can chain together abilities to aggravate his opponent.
One combination Graham puts together chains Geras’ ability to freeze opponents in place — a move I believe is called Temporal Advantage — with Shifting Sands, which behaves like a gravity well, slowing and inhibiting an opponent’s movement. He quickly follows that up with Lost Time, eating 30 seconds off the clock. As shown in the GIF below, Geras makes it difficult for Baraka to reach him and overcome his health deficit.
As Graham notes in his video, which you can watch at the top of this post, there are other moves that Geras players could combine with Lost Time to run down the clock more effectively. NetherRealm may tweak and rebalance some of those moves over the next few months, but however Geras winds up in the final version of the game, he’s certainly going to be a fascinating character to watch in high-level Mortal Kombat 11 play.
Mortal Kombat 11 is coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One on April 23.
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