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Mother Russia Bleeds is strangely unremarkable. Despite all the gore and deviant behaviour on show the lasting impression is one of relative indifference. The clunky and repetitive combat is clearly part of a homage to brawlers of yesteryear but it does the experience no favours and ultimately negates any hope at a proper recommendation. It’s not smart enough to be subversive, nor is it nasty enough to be genuinely shocking. Instead it all smacks of an infantile sensibility that while gleefully gross, is nevertheless doomed to quickly descend into blood-stained tedium once the 500th head has been smashed upon the pavement.
One would hope that for all the drugs, violence and sex, that there would be some sort of point behind it. Unfortunately it only seems to be there out of a presumed notion of the developer that it would look cool and be oh so shocking. Wes Craven once made a point about Quentin Tarantino when walking out of Reservoir Dogs; that savage violence ought to mean something, otherwise it serves little purpose other than to make you look childish. Whilst Mother Russia Bleeds certainly has its moments, it IS childish, and really is just a big hedonistic rush of splatter and carnage.
That’s not to say there isn’t fun to be found. The impact and brutality of its combat can be pleasingly cathartic at times. Enemies will often block your hits or dodge annoyingly out of range, so the pleasure in pinning them down and pummelling their face is all too real. Perhaps I was too hasty and there is a point to all this: how easy it is to act like a complete psychopath despite being, in my case at least, staggeringly harmless. But that would do the game too much credit as the narrative and writing has a real dearth of imagination and its attempts to flirt with politics come across as half-hearted at best.
You play as one of four Romany ruffians on a quest for revenge against the sinister organisation that imprisoned you and subjected you to experiments with Nekro; a dangerous drug that upon your escape, has ravaged the soviet underclasses. You have a friend named Vlad (of course he is) who recruits you into his plan to overthrow the puppet government and its unseen masters, and your task is essentially to travel from location to location singularly annihilating everyone responsible for all this nonsense.
The Drug use factors into gameplay by providing health. Enemies can be harvested for it and use whilst at full health will cause you to enter a trippy, sped up version of the game for a brief time. There’s no real negative effect other than use at certain times causing you to get a different ending. There are also other effects you can unlock via the game’s survival arena mode, but in essence it’s a thinly disguised health potion and doesn’t really give the experience any claim to uniqueness in this regard.
The combat is similarly lacking in novelty, you punch, kick, throw and various combinations of the three. Enemies on the ground can be pummelled but that in turn exposes you to attacks so it’s best used when clear of other threats. It’s all very streets of rage/double dragon so fans of the genre will find themselves at home here, but for as much love as I have for the genre, it’s harder to see the appeal in a world that has since moved on to 3D fisticuffs, with the perverse majesty of something like Bayonetta sitting atop its pantheon. As it is, combat is repetitive and aside from some inventive boss battles, goes through the (admittedly gory) motions.
Visually the experience stands up much better. It may be yet another pixel art game, but the art itself is suitably grim and psychotic. It certainly captures an atmosphere of a society in the throws of hedonistic madness and the lack of detail allows for some much welcome full frontal male nudity. When so many games with sexual content choose to ignore or cover up man’s ever so sacred meat stick, it’s agreeable to find one that doesn’t, even if it is only a few pixels swaying gaily in the breeze.
As a side note, I must say I am getting rather fed up with depictions of BDSM in games and in fact most media in general. It is almost always displayed as an evil and grotesque vice of the ultra rich and decadent, where the reality is often one of love and of a beautiful, intimate trust. It is something of a minor and personal gripe, and it goes far beyond games, but it would be nice to find an experience that manages to capture the essence of it a little better.
It would also have benefited the game much more to have a soundtrack that actually fits the action. Taken on its own, the electronic bleeps, bloops and wubs are serviceable, but they tend to jar with the on screen events more often than enhance them. It certainly would have helped to liven up the action as the combat mechanics are not enough on their own and it comes as another missed opportunity to give the action a more engaging context.
By design Mother Russia Bleeds was never going to be exceptional. If you’re making an old-school brawler then that simple fact alone means you’re going to struggle to create something which feels fun in an industry that long since evolved past the genre. There’s no evolution to be found in the combat so the game has to surround it with something compelling to sustain interest. Unfortunately, MRB is only partially successful in that endeavour, and so becomes little more than a mildly diverting, if very bloody, distraction.
