Game EXP: Mother Russia Bleeds (NS)

I picked up Mother Russia Bleeds a while back, sometime around late March and early April when a lot of indie games were going on sale around the beginning of the pandemic; it is, as of this writing on sale at 75% off.  Mother Russia Bleeds (MRB) is a beat'em up brawler from Le Cartel Studios and published by Devolver Digital.

Side-scrolling arcade-style beat'em ups are not typically my thing, or at least I think they aren't, but I do enjoy games like Golden Axe, Castle Crashers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game, The Simpsons Arcade Game, so I am not completely new to the genre.  What got me interested in MRB was the early 1980s alternate history aesthetic (coming off of Wolfenstein: The New Order), I enjoyed the trailer from the eShop although I knew that the cartoon art for the trailer was not representative of what the game looked like, and again, with it being on sale, I thought a beat'em up would be a good change of pace.

And it was.  Kind of.

The Cast of layers.

I started the game on Normal difficulty playing as Boris for a couple of reasons.  First Natasha, and Ivan all looked pretty standard fare for this type of game with Ivan being the strong slow type and Natasha being the fast weak type. Boris, I liked his lanky, crouched, half-crazed Romani Mark Bonanno type appearance.  His stats I preferred too since he was not on either extreme and I would prefer to be slightly slower and stronger than weaker with less range.  I chose Normal because it is what I try to start every game given the option.  Granted my combo and group fighting skills are not very good so I knew that even on Normal difficulty, there was going to be some challenge, but that was why I picked up MRB in the first place.

The body count in this game is stupidly high. And that's what makes it fun.

In the tutorial and first two chapters (because the game refers to stages/levels as chapters), I handled myself well.  I never tried to beat the stages for time and just focused on surviving, but since I am not the best beat'em up player, I did die a number of times, and this is where my first criticism comes in.  MRB is styled after arcade games of the same genre, where you would put in a quarter and buy three-four lives.  Once you go through those lives (because there is no way you are getting through unscathed), another quarter goes in until you run out of quarters or patience.  In MRB, when you die at the end of your first life, the screen goes grey, and you are taken back to a loading screen which prompts you to "Press -/+ to Continue."  Obviously, I want to continue, or I just would have paused and exited the game.  This just feels like an unneeded extra step that slows down the action, in a game that is all about action.  I do not mind the checkpoints in the game, especially since you have unlimited lives and I can understand having you restart from a checkpoint rather than respawning, or at least I got used to the concept of restarting rather than respawning.

Don't Worry, that Dude's With Me.

In the second level, the mechanic of Nekro is introduced, which is indicated by the needle next to the player's name/health in the upper left.  Nekro is a shiny green Re-Animator colored drug that is core to the story and can have varying effects on the player.  The first is that you can use it to heal yourself as there are no pot roasts or whole turkeys hanging out in trashcans or behind brick walls in this game.  The secondary effect depends on which type of Nekro you have decided to use, which you select at the same time as your character, and the type of Nekro available are only unlockable if you play the mob-rush arena mode, but more on that later.  The point is, when you start out, this drug that you can pull from spasming corpses (as long as you do not completely destroy their head by punching it into oblivion like the picture above) to refill your syringe with up to three doses, and use it to either heal, or give yourself temporary increased speed, strength, and instakill one or two enemies.  It is a pretty neat mechanic that I definitely took advantage of although I would typically save the Nekro for heals.

About 0.47 Seconds Before Disaster (But Not For Me. Finally).

Eventually, in Chapter 3 I did have to turn down the difficulty to Easy from Normal and thus began my run through the rest of the game on Easy because I stopped caring that I was trying to impress either myself or anyone else.  It really was the boss fight that did me in as I felt that I was doing fine for the most part, until additional mechanics and conditions for winning were thrown into the meat-grinding-mix.  During the boss fight, you had the left side of the screen like some kind of meat-grinding combine harvester in the bottom of an Olympic sized swimming pool.  If you hit the harvester, you lost a significant chunk of life.  On the other side, you had the stereotypical big-burly 50% muscle, 50% fat boss-dude who you could hit 1-2 times before he knocked you to the ground.  Oh, and along with the boss were types of enemies that you had encountered earlier in the chapter.  I also found that it was difficult to draw Nekro out of enemies due to the threat of the harvester and the boss.  It was after my fourth attempt that I apparently reached the end of the pool, the boss knocked me down, then jumped up on an escape ladder leaving me to die by the harvester.  This was when I turned the game down to Easy.  And in doing so I had to start the entire chapter all over again.  Which was a bit annoying, but it only took about 15 minutes to get back to the boss.  It was not until my 10th attempt that I finally managed to kill the boss by hitting him (enough times) with a baseball bat into the harvester, gumming up the machine and stopping the driver from killing me after I killed his boss.

These Older Attendants are Rather Spry for their Old Age.

My second "Well god damn this bullshit" moment happened in Chapter Four.  This section had you on a train, and around the third checkpoint, you needed to hold a walkie-talkie and keep it away from (I think) any enemy or they would radio the conductor and stop the train, preventing you from getting to your destination.  If an enemy grabbed the radio, you would usually have a couple of seconds to get to them and knock the radio out of their hands by any means necessary.  Now, you could punch enemies while holding the walkie-talkie, but this seemed to do significantly less damage, and you could not throw your enemies because this made you drop the walkie-talkie too.  I found that my only attack options were to either kick, or do a jump-kick, both of which knocked back the enemies, but did not seem to do as much damage as punching (but it did do more damage than hitting with the radio).  This section really felt like it was designed to be played with multiple people as you could have radio-person running around avoiding enemies (and kicking when they could) and have the other person wailing away on everyone else.  That was how it felt to me, and it felt very annoying.

Все копы – ублюдки!

And that was pretty much it for what annoyed me in the game.  Almost.  Chapters five, six, and seven were all well-paced, the locations were interesting with nothing so gimmicky as needing to fend off wave after wave of enemies while a computer technician spent for god-damn-ever hacking into a computer terminal.  Once AK-47s were introduced it made me feel damn near invincible, which after chapters three and four was a great change of pace.  Plus having a couple of NPCs fighting next to you (the Gimp in Chapter Five and the revolutionaries in Chapter Six) is always welcome support.

Chapter Eight, the final chapter in the game though, that was when things once again took a turn for the worse.  Maybe because I was kind of over MRB at this point, having fun part of the time, but still feeling that because I was playing solo that I was missing out on aspects that the developers had worked on, or that the game was not designed with this particular play-style in mind.  There was even one of the pop-up tips on loading screens that said you could have computer-controlled characters fight alongside you, but I never saw that option in the character selection screen, or in the options menu.  The final chapter consisted of a lot of areas, ultimately taking me nearly 20 minutes (and a couple of deaths/checkpoint restarts) to reach the final boss, or the first of two boss fights, broken up into four different fights, but only one checkpoint.

Attempt #2 of 10,247.69

When you first fight the final boss, you have to prevent him from escaping via a helicopter rope ladder while being mobbed by mobs of the mobsters' men.  This section took three attempts.  The next was more of a fight inside Boris's mind against a physical manifestation of the Nekro drug that you take throughout the game.  That battle had three (three-and-a-half?) different sections, none of which spawned additional Nekro [for healing or whatever the secondary effect was (more on that later)], so the life and Nekro you enter the fight with is what you have until the end, so it does kind of behoove the player to die immediately when the fight starts if you are continuing so that you can start the fight over with full health and Nekro.  The three fights of the Nekro Boss were alright as themselves, but they did take a while to figure out what to do, plus when you died, you had to start all over.  I cannot specifically remember how many attempts I made against Nekro Boss, but I know it took three or four to figure out I had to throw the syringes against the pulsating walls, figuring out the Pummeling Fists of Flesh was easy enough, fighting the actual boss was a handful of times, and I beat the final form (when it splits into two entities and speeds up) on my third attempt.

I am Hoping that Out of Context, There Won't Be Spoilers Here.

I did end up earning the Bad Ending, which was pointed out to me because I used Nekro during the Nekro Boss fight, which makes sense that if you use the drug during your fight with the physical manifestation of that drug, it could be that you are giving it power?  Or something?  But once I beat the game and it rolled to credits, I was not about to jump back in, spend another 20 minutes getting to the Nekro Boss fight, just to see what would happen if I managed to make it without using Nekro.  I enjoy a challenge, but only if I am already enjoying the game.  Now, someone could say that that fight up to the Nekro Boss would be easier with X-Type of Nekro, but you are only able to gain additional types of Nekro outside of the main storyline.

Squeal for Me Pig Boy!

Earlier I hand mentioned that you are able to select the type of Nekro you use, but only under certain circumstances.  You start out with Nekro that heals or gives a strength/speed boost by default.  To get additional types of Nekro, you have to play the Arena enemy rush mode that you unlock as you complete each chapter and make it to at least the 10th Wave.  Each Arena area uses a section of the chapter, along with enemies that you find, all dealing with a slightly different mechanic, gimmick, or environmental hazard.  In the starting area, you just fight in a standard pit in a street.  In the sewers area (Chapter 2), there are rats that run through the area making you slightly slower and (I think) cause a little damage when they latch on, and in the BDSM club area (Chapter Six) where you have enemies throwing bottles at you (that always knock you over) but there are weapons that frequently fall from the sky.  Now, there is no difficulty setting for the Arena mode and I was only able to make it past the sixth wave on two occasions, the first being in the first Arena which I got to Wave 10 and earned the [name] Nekro which was vague in its description of "[description]."  After a couple of attempts, I gave up because dying was not any fun when you are seven waves short.  So I settled for the standard Nekro for the rest of the game, which was fine because as long as it healed when I needed it to, then it worked well enough for me.

So I believe this is where I part ways with Mother Russia Bleeds.  I would say that I had fun for about 65% of the time, but there were times when the game was beyond frustrating (game mechanics, level design, single-player vs. co-op) but when it clicked, it performed very well (weight of attacks, story, humor) which is why I still felt compelled to play the game to the end, even if it was on Easy.  I could see a second run in my future, but only if I were playing with someone better than I at beat'em up brawlers and playing local co-op.  I might even be tempted to play as someone else besides Boris too.  Maybe.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian