That's what I liked about this one. There was an actual tournament style with 5 fighters on each side. The first movies, Outworld was doing a lot of cheating trying to take out Earth's best fighters before they could be matched up with anybody in the actual tournament at no risk to the tournament outside of losing one of their fighters. Most of Outworld's wins where from there attempt to cheat. In this new movie, Outworld was still doing the same thing but if their fighter loses, they lose one of their 5 spots in the tournament. And to be honest, the previous movies weren't even tournaments. It was just a bunch of matchups over the whole movie with no count of who's up and who's down until it's time to fight the final boss.
Also, I didn't like that Shang Tsung basically seemed like an aristocrat that wasn't really much of a threat. He didn't need to be in the movie.