In an alternate Eighties USSR, a crew of four imprisoned street fighters fight for their lives on the streets, whilst staving off hard drug addiction
The most unrelenting, violent beat-em-up we’ve seen take to the screens in recent years, Mother Russia Bleeds isn’t scared of controversy. It’s heavily inspired by Hotline Miami, if you wanted a sense of where this preview is going already, and doesn't shy away from 2D pixel gore, bad language, bad taste or gritty weirdness.
You play as an anti-hero that’s addicted to a peculiar new super-drug that’s been manufactured by an alternate USSR government – using prisoners for experimentation. This hallucinogenic concoction is incredibly addictive, and the four central characters of the game are all hooked. The game – a side-crolling beat-em'up that’s taken cues from Double Dragon and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World: The Game – can therefore get away with a lot of weird visual trickery. You’re playing as an ultra-violent thug who’s on a semi-permanent out-of-this-world trip, basically – so think of the art direction as something like A Clockwork Orange meets Requiem For A Dream and you’re in the right area.
The game can be played with up to three other players, so we’re hoping that hints at pretty insane and massive bosses that you’ve got to tackle as a team. Think of the boss potential you can have when all your protagonists are absolutely out of their minds on narcotics… it certainly frees up the artists and their creative hands, right? But it’s not all about going mad or going too violent and too gory. The game was created, apparently, to ‘do something different, more powerful, with in-game violence’.
But we’re concerned by that statement – we’ve seen one level set in a sex club that saw the protagonists pushing through a sea of faceless goons, all identical, as you bash their heads in with various crunchy moves. Bar regulars look on, undeterred, and pixelart strippers continue to gyrate and grind. Hotline Miami never did that, it didn’t need to. For a game that riffs so heavily on Dennaton’s classic, we’re worried Mother Russia Bleeds might not have quite grasped the subtlety of its predecessor.
But we haven’t played the full game yet, and it might have some fantastic narrative justification for the scene – maybe one of the characters you play as has some deep-rooted insecurities about his sexuality, and as he hallucinates these manifest as semi-naked gimps that he needs to banish as those more comfortable with their sexuality look on. That’d be new, that’d be different. We trust Devolver and the games it chooses to publish, though, and we’re sure this story of psychotic vengeance will be something more than just an 18+ Streets Of Rage.