Beat’em up titles are of a bygone era. You have a better chance of seeing Jesus than seeing a high quality beat’em game these days. Titles like FInal Fight and Streets of Rage dominated the market with their fun couch co-op, awesome music, and great sprite animations; there was a beat’em up for everyone. X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, even Power Rangers saw success in the genre and most of it was damn good. Fast forward to 2016 with some hits and misses in the genre from numerous developers, Devolver Games has decided to try their own luck with the genre. The results? A brutal trip through a turbulent time period in a volatile country that will infuriate you more than all the Dark Souls game’s combined.
Mother Russia Bleeds is set in 1980s Soviet Russian and you select one of four Romani (Gypsies) living in the slums. While participating in street fighting, the town is overrun with government troops and you are rounded up and sent to a gulag prison. While in prison you are experimented on with a new drug called Nekro, which pretty much turns you into a super soldier capable of punching people’s heads off. Breaking out of this underground lab set under the gulag prison you set off to get revenge on whoever did this to you; and why not topple the Soviet government while you’re at it.
Mother Russia Bleeds is a brutal game. The combat itself is simple which in this type of game it should be: punching, grabbing, and throwing your victims at the evil men you face throughout the game. Enemies are the lowest of the low. Rapists, drug dealers, and strung out hookers make up a lot of the enemies you take on, but there is a lot more where they came from. This says a lot as you see some pretty disturbing images in the level backgrounds.
You visit weird bondage clubs where dudes are doing all sorts of weird things to each other and penisis are swining all over the place. Riots are happening in the streets with some brutal sprite animations in the backgrounds and brain matter and guts splash all over the levels when beating goons down; it’s all very, very graphic and definitely not for kids. The soundtrack is also quite good, fitting the mood pretty well; it can also feeling fairly haunting as well due to the location you’re in.
Hand-to-hand combat is what makes beat’em up games. It’s 95% of any game in the genre and thankfully Mother Russia Bleeds achieves this is bloody fashion. Beating up on your enemies leave them bloodied and bruised. Enemies show visual damage on their character models to indicate how much health they have left. The more beat up they look, the closer to death they are. It’s a unique take especially in a pixel art game, but it works just fine.
One of the unique features is your ability to combine moves together. It’s not complex in any way and I never really used it as much later on in the game but a nice addition none the less. While doing your standard attack you won’t automatically go into a four hit combo like most beat’em up games do. You simply punch until the enemy is dead. What you can do is go into a kick and stun an enemy or send them into the air, when you can then jump up and grab them in mid-air and slam them into the ground. While grabbing an enemy, you can punch away until they die, toss them into other goons, or smash them into the ground and pound away on their face.
Mother Russia Bleeds is a hard game, and I do mean hard. For those of you who have played Streets of Rage 3, you remember just how hard that game was. This game brought me into a rage that I hadn’t been in playing a game since Streets of Rage 3. Most of this falls on cheap encounters and bad hit detection. At times you will be able to take out goons at a normal pace, but as you continue on with the game you start to see how unfair it gets.
There are times when you will encounter around fifteen to twenty enemies of different kinds. Some will tackle you, others will slide tackle you, while others will show up with guns and lay waste to everything in their line of sight include their own men. It gets crazy and you just can’t keep up with the different styles they all bring. What makes it worse is the game’s hit detection gives the AI an advantage.
A lot of times I would swing and miss an enemy who is slightly on top of me, but he will easily be able to hit me from his position. There are also times when I would go to grab an enemy who is quite literally in front of me and I would miss when I clearly shouldn’t. Enemies will also pull off cheap tactics like punching me with a time delay. What this means is instead of comboing me like they should, they would hit me, wait one second, and then hit me again as my character recovers from a hit animation. What this means is every time I recover, they hit me again, keeping me from falling down, repeating the process until i’m dead. This is a strategy a lot of us used in boss battles in old beat’em up games; I guess it’s karma coming back at us.
Speaking of boss battles, Mother Russia Bleeds takes a unique approach to bosses. Bosses play out more like a strategy where you have to use a specific weapon and environmental object to defeat. In one boss fight, a giant meat grinding tractor is chasing you and you have to knock the boss into it. It’s all quite fun and frustrating at the same time. I will say this as well: The game features probably one of the worst final boss fights. It’s so brutally hard for all the reason i mentioned earlier and then some.
Thankfully you don’t have lives or continues. Everytime you die, you simply reload at the last checkpoint and a lot of the levels provided plenty of them of them. Another interesting aspect of the game is your ability to heal or go into berserk mode and lay waste to everyone. At the start of the game, you are provided with a syringe full of Nekro. The Syringe is full with three bars, which you can use to heal yourself or inject yourself and go berserk. Going berserk will increase your strength and you can get through enemies pretty easily you can even grab enemies and perform brutal fatalities like punch off their head.
The trick to using the Nekro is deciding whether to save it to heal yourself or use it to go on a rampage. You aren’t just limited to the three uses though. Defeated enemies will sometimes convuls after being knocked out. This is you cue to go and drain the Nekro from their bodies and refill your syringe; I guess it’s a good thing for you that everyone in Mother Russia Bleeds is apparently addicted to Nekro. You can also unlock different Nekro that give different effects to you by competing in the game’s arena mode.
Outside of the game’s story mode, which you can tackle with three other players in local couch co-op, there is an arena mode where you will take on waves of enemies until you die, with leaderboards to compare how fast you beat a level and how many points you got with other players and two different endings to unlock. I should also mention that you can change your difficulty to easy mode if you feel the game is too hard, but even at easy the game can get quite challenging later on.
Mother Russia Bleeds succeeds exactly where it needed to: hand-to-hand side scrolling combat. It can be a disturbing game at times and its level of violence can be quite shocking at times but what holds it back is its cheap AI, and brutal difficulty that in all honestly kept me from having fun throughout the entire experience.