MK4, while "it wasn’t until Armageddon and Mortal Kombat 9 that they were able to make him seem like an actual threat," and further adding that in MKX, he "was pretty fun as a hybrid of Emperor Palpatine and Loki." Hardcore Gaming 101 called him "one of the lamest final bosses in the series" and said, "He can steal the moves from other characters and summon skeleton hands, but that's more or less it, which is pretty lame for a guy who overthrew Lucifer." Mikel Reparaz of GamesRadar described the character as "a pale old man in a stupid hat." Complex chose Shinnok as the second-most underrated MK character behind Kenshi in 2011, calling him an "uber-evil version of Merlin," and ranked him sixth in their 2013 selection of the twenty "most brutal" series characters, for his "cunning and deviousness" and being "arguably as heartless as Shao Kahn." Dom Nero of Esquire, in 2019, described Shinnok in MKX as a "malignant [and] terrible shithead." In 2015, Liam Martin of Digital Spy rated Shinnok's "Hell Hands" second behind Quan Chi's "Leg Beatdown" as his favorite MK4 Fatality. Den of Geek described Corrupted Shinnok's Fatality in MKX, in which he summons two winged demons to impale his opponent on a spiked column, then drags the corpse downward across the spikes before the demons then feast on the remains, as "certainly something special." Eric Snider of Film.com remarked in his review of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, "We find out that [Raiden] and Shao Kahn are actually brothers, and that their father, the evil Shinnok ... is one of the Elder Gods. This must have been the 'Luke, I am your father' moment of the Mortal Kombat series." References Action film characters Action film villains Deity characters in video games Fictional gods Fictional mass murderers Fictional nihilists Fictional polearm and spearfighters Male characters in video games Male film villains Male video game villains Mortal Kombat characters Video game antagonists Video game bosses Video game characters introduced in 1997 Video game characters who can teleport