Mother Russia Bleeds is a game that takes an classic genre and paints it blood red. While beat-em-ups back their heyday through the late 80s and early 90s were always an inherently violent genre, it was largely considered okay for kids. Cut to 2016; Devolver Digital has made a name for themselves by publishing the likes of Hotline Miami and a modern day Shadow Warrior reboot, and they’ve become known as the publisher for weird, often hyper violent games. French developer Le Cartel Studio took this old genre and mashed it up with aesthetic elements of the aforementioned Hotline Miami, chief among them being the heavy use of Russian crime in its story, and insanely detailed pixel art violence to accompany the action.
Mother Russia Bleeds follows the exploits of a group of Ruska Roma raising money via street fights to fund their revolutionary exploits. Things are going more or less okay when the government raids their camp, and the four playable protagonists come to in a mysterious lab where they’ve been forced to use Nekro, a mysterious drug that gives people superhuman powers and insane physical resilience to damage. They use this cursed substance to eviscerate, decapitate, bludgeon, shoot, grind, and stomp their way through a variety of locations, culminating in a well to do high rise showdown with the government officials who started these illegal Nekro experiments on the poor in the first place.
While the story is fairly standard, the feel of the game is unlike anything else. Immediately apparent is the exceptionally detailed and hyper grimy art style; environments are packed with little details like trash and graffiti to give off the seedy atmosphere Le Cartel was going for, and meanwhile enemies take visible damage to reflect the abuse you put them through. The violence is all rendered in a way that somehow manages to be both cartoonish and jaw droppingly brutal. See, unlike in other beat-em-ups, enemies don’t just disappear when they die. Their corpses remain, and terrible things happen to their bodies, and it’s pretty much all shown in painstakingly rendered pixels. It’s both extremely impressive and a little gross. Picture a more grounded version of the gore in something like Riki- Oh: The Story of Riki and you have an idea of what the game holds.
The fact that the four playable characters are street fighting revolutionaries gives Le Cartel all the excuse they need to have the usual beat-em-up archetypes present and accounted for. Sergei is something of an all rounder and sports a sweet red track suit, although he’s slightly faster than he is powerful; Ivan is the slowest character, but hits like a truck and can knock down most enemies with ease; Natasha is the weakest character in the game, but also the fastest, and has a crazy jumping move to add to her mobility; and Boris is the resident psychopath, similar to Sergei but slightly more powerful than he is fast. While none of the characters play super differently from one another, they each have small nuances in their move sets that help set them apart.
The game uses a pretty standard formula for its combat. You’ve got punches and kicks, grapples, throws, you can pick up items and use them as weapons, there are jump kicks and you can slide by kicking while sprinting, and in the game’s simplest but surprising wrinkle, you can actually get on top of enemies on the ground and hit them until they die. It doesn’t rewrite the rule book, but the fact that you’re able to beat on grounded enemies gives the game a surprising amount of strategy. In later levels, it’s all about target prioritization and crowd control as you try to chip away at the health of whoever happens to be your least favorite enemy on screen while knocking down their friends who will take every opportunity they can to slap you around. The enemy variety is pretty solid; certain types will just punch you and sometimes hit you while you’re down. Others grab you and leave you open to attack from their friends. Still others will use jump kicks against you almost exclusively (countering them is fun, because you can grab them out of midair and slam them into the ground if you’re skilled enough, leaving them wide open for a ground beat down). The bosses at the end also have unique gimmicks; in one stage, you’re fighting a gang of drug dealers while running from a giant meat grinder. In another, you have to fist fight an incinerator tank. In what is perhaps one of my favorite encounters, you are thrown into a fighting pit to test your mettle against a bear.
It takes a while to learn the patterns of every character, and the game can be unforgiving for slow learners. It isn’t uncommon on higher difficulties to lose half your health to a combo of enemies. All this does is force the player to play even dirtier than they have been, and that can be achieved through the use of Nekro. The characters are mad that they’ve become addicts, but take full advantage of it to bring down the oppressive government. Nekro has two functions in combat; either you can use it to heal, or you can use it to go into berserk mode, where the characters literally see red, move much faster, send enemies flying with their punches and kicks, or you can grab them and do some ungodly act like crushing their skull with your bare hands or ripping their throat out. The enemies are also infected with Nekro, and their bodies will often twitch, signaling that you can refill your syringe by standing over their body and making yourself vulnerable while you draw the fluid from them. You can unlock different strains of Nekro by making it to wave 10 on one of the many survival maps, which simply tests the player’s combat skills by throwing increasingly more difficult waves of enemies at them. Some of these strains make enemies explode, some are single use but can be refilled extremely fast, and it’s fun to mess around with the different kinds that are available.
Nekro adds a neat wrinkle to the combat, one that rewards careful use of its abilities. Everything mentioned thus far comes together to make a dirty, extreme version of the beat-em-ups that inspired it. This also carries through to the levels; one of the more memorable ones sees the crew fight their way through a Russian sex club, and it’s one of many instances where the dark wave sound track by Fixions sells a unique, oppressive atmosphere. The music as a whole is generally very good, selling the grimy atmosphere and putting the player in the shoes of desperate people fighting against an entire oppressive regime.
Mother Russia Bleeds was one of the earlier games in the modern beat-em-up revival, and it still stands out for its sheer bloodthirstiness and commitment to a seedy atmosphere. While it doesn’t rewrite the genre playbook, it does give the genre a shot of the grossest crack you’ve ever seen straight into the aorta, and the result is a memorable, if extremely violent, story of the downtrodden overcoming their oppressors. Le Cartel Studio has been mum on a potential sequel, so as it stands, this is a one and done, nasty piece of work.
