Mortal Kombat 11's Mileena gameplay trailer is somehow gorier than I thought it would be

Yesterday, a new Mortal Kombat 11 gameplay trailer featuring returning fan-favorite fighter Mileena was teased via the unusual medium of an Instagram ad featuring pop star Megan Thee Stallion dressed as the character. Now the trailer is here, and it highlights the sai-wielding genetic experiment's toothy maw and sharp knives. There's a lot of blood.

It's Mortal Kombat, so of course that's to be expected. But even so, I was surprised by the moment where Mileena pins an enemy to the ground and then plays the knife game (à la Bishop from Aliens) on their face, even holding her hand up afterward to check she hasn't stabbed herself. 

I was surprised again when the move where she repeatedly stabs an enemy in the stomach, bites half their neck off, throws her knives through their eyes, and then comes back to rip off the other half of their neck turned out not to be a fatality. No, the fatality comes after that, when she leaps into the air, spins herself up into a purple Sonic the Hedgehog, and then straight-up bifurcates someone, who should surely be dead already, in a shower of intestines. Mortal Kombat knows its audience. 

Mileena is part of the Kombat Pack 2 DLC, along with Rambo, which will be out on November 17.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.