Mother Russia Bleeds

Mother Russia Bleeds is a side-scrolling pixel art brawler published by Devolver. It's a game that sits comfortably in their publishing portfolio alongside the likes of Hotline Miami. Less cerebral, though equally brutal to the smash hit top-down massacre, Mother Russia Bleeds is a solid game not devoid of problems common in its genre. 

Mother Russia Bleeds is a period drama. The period is the 60s and the setting is the Indie Mecca of semi-fictional newly broken up USSR. Mother Russia could comfortably co-habit the same fictional universe as Papers, Please. The plot of the game is classically Brawlery: someone did you wrong - smash their bloody face in. It's a game about freedom more than anything else. Whichever of the four characters you pick, they start off as a gypsy street fighter and end up as a freedom fighter facing a shady military force. Your character begins as a free spirit only to be captured and experimented on until they gather the strength to fight for their emancipation. After breaking out of the labs they were kept in, they have to break out of jail with both the guards and the inmates posing a threat. There is very little in Mother Russia Bleeds that isn't trying to kill you and the blend of mobsters and military special forces creates a world of stereotypical Balkan corruption. The plot not only covers the fight for legal and political freedom but also psychological freedom - freedom from addiction. One of the main themes running through the story is the abuse of psychoactive drugs to enhance combat ability. It's the ugly face of war. 

Where in Hotline Miami the degree to which drugs played part and the extent of the player's experience that was reliable was purposely ambiguous and open to our personal interpretation, Mother Russia serves us a healthy warm dose of the 'real' and then our junkie hallucinations on a cold, blood-spattered platter. Nekro the drug becomes Nekro the super-villain. The story mode offers two endings for defeating Nekro in different ways. Should you use the drug to heal or power up at any point during the final fight, your character will find themselves overdosing and despite saving the day won't live long enough to see it. If you manage to, however, beat all three stages of the final boss fight without using Nekro once, your character will beat their addiction and cement their place in history as a war hero and the five or six hours of over indulgent gory freedom fighting will be skimmed over in schools. 

I expected Mother Russia to have a throwaway story about how Soviet oppression was bad and made good people mad and violent. Instead, the game deftly explores friendship, betrayal, patriotism and aforementioned addiction. The dialogue is vulgar but never too cringey. One of the levels opens with an exchange between two soon-to-be enemies which shines a little light on how many of your victims are simply doing a job, moral reservations aside. This humanises some of your foes and adds another angle to the massacre - I almost felt guilty smashing in soldiers' skulls. 

On the technical side of things, Mother Russia Bleeds suffers many of the gripes and shortcomings of 2D brawlers. Hit boxes. I played through the game as Natasha and her tiny female fists didn't seem to connect half as much as they should have and the salt pouring out of me screams, "Sexism!" But the rational part of me whispers, "Bullshit hit boxes." Or is it the other way around? You get a weak punch and strong kick which you can combine into nice chains with hidden moves including stuns and knockdowns; all really satisfying, well animated stuff. But whenever I run into trouble (read: forty-plus enemies at once) I just used the jumping kick exploit. See, the kick move knocks enemies onto the ground and the jump works (most of the time) as a form of a dodge. It looks ridiculous but works - blue cheese. The game is rather geared to fast-paced offense since your only defensive capability is an unreliable horizontal dodge with about 20 frames of invincibility. This is probably my biggest technical gripe (get it? Because the hit boxes are tiny): why is there no vertical dodge?! The jump leaves you exposed as your lowest extremity at the highest point of the jump is below your highest extremity on the ground. Pressing jump and dodge yields nothing and it begs the question, could such a function be patched in? If the game has a vertical dodge I'd be much more inclined to explore the arena mode to its full extent. 

The game has a very solid Co-op option. Playing with someone else is actually the best way to enjoy the frenzied free-for-all to its fullest. In all honesty, I don't think I could've gotten through the final two stages without help, I was stuck on the coliseum boss for a little while and being able to draw the beast out with one character to attack with the other made all the difference. The Nekro used for healing and entering a rage can be used to revive your fallen comrade. The Nekro creates an interesting health economy for the game. At full charge, you get three shots each of which will heal about a third of your health or make your character faster and stronger for a few seconds. The only way to recharge is to draw Nekro from the the twitching corpse of an enemy. The first catch here is that only about one-in-twenty of the bastards twitch and the second is that drawing Nekro leaves you defenseless. A Co-op partner comes in handy again but the sheer volume of minions means that you still have to be quick and aware. The use and acquisition of Nekro is what separates Mother Russia from other games in its genre and takes it a class above most of the others. 

Mother Russia Bleeds is: Christmas in a chav home/10

Bethesda's Fallouts just aren't that S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

The original Fallout is one of the earliest games I've ever played. I was about six when it came out and it made up a pretty important part of my childhood. If I was asked to name my all-time favourite game,  Fallout would instantly enter the conversation. What makes Fallout so special for me is its S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat system. 

Fallout adopted GURPS – Generic Universal Role Playing System – by Steve Jackson Games and moulded it to its own needs. At its very core, S.P.E.C.I.A.L is made up of stats: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. These stats are set at the very beginning of the game and are permanent. The player is given 40 points to distribute among these stats with values between one and ten. It all seems pretty straight forward until you realise just how much of an impact your decision here makes. Low Luck will make guns blow up in your face. Low Agility will make you drop your weapons through clumsiness. Low Perception will make you borderline blind. Low Intelligence will make you not sentence good. If you thought picking your starter Pokémon was tough, try building a Fallout character you're happy with. 

Of course, experienced players have found optimal builds and there are secret ways of improving certain stats during the course of the game, but 'dumb' playthroughs are still incredibly popular. S.P.E.C.I.A.L not only lets you build a character, it lets you role-play. With low Endurance your character will be more susceptible to addiction but the points you free up can go into Intelligence and Perception and you can role play a post-apocalyptic Gregory House or Rick Sanchez. On your first go you're likely to try building an all-rounder who ends up being really mediocre or unknowingly force yourself into a specialisation with practically your first choice of the game. And that's great - it offers a different challenge. But then Bethesda got their hands on the franchise. 

I was actually a big proponent of Fallout 3 becoming a First Person Action RPG, it was the most logical place for the franchise to go, especially with Bethesda involved. I remember a lot of people worrying about Fallout 3 being "Oblivion with guns" at the time and my rebuttal of that worry always involved S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Little was I to know that what has always been a massive and much loved feature would be revamped the way Bethesda has been revamping its Elder Scrolls series - by trimming. 

Where in the first two Fallouts your stats built a foundation for who your character is in a meaningful, often obscure way, Bethesda's Fallouts have a much more mundane attitude towards them. You occasionally might get a strength or intelligence check in the game but those are telegraphed along with the needed stat points. Mostly, Intelligence gives more skill points at level up, Strength lets you carry more, Agility gives you more action points for V.A.T.S. It's all predictable and unimaginative. It's boring. The joy of Fallout no longer comes from playing a character, only from meeting characters and 'doing stuff', removing much of the role-playing the game was so good at. 

This begs the question: with the likes of Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity enjoying success, could we have a smaller developer (not indie perhaps, but AA) attempt to recreate the style of role-play from the original Fallout games? Wouldn't it be great if you could doom a character to being a klutz or make them so lucky they run into hidden stashes of weapons on accident? Wouldn't it be great if you could mould a different path for your experience with a game every time you start it over to that degree? Make RPGs great again, make them S.P.E.C.I.A.L. 

Bethesda's Fallouts are: your best friend after a lobotomy/10