Blood of Mehran is awful. It’s awful in a way that I didn’t think was possible anymore. It’s like a sloppy PS2 action game that was cobbled together to cash in on the God of War/DMC craze of 20 years ago, hoping to trick edgy teenage boys with a sick ass cover and the promise of gnarly dismemberment. But now it’s 2025, gaming has grown up and so has Kratos; now a single widower with a BOY. He’s still capable of disembowelling monsters and NPC’s he finds annoying, but it’s now in a package clearly inspired by the AAA over the shoulder cinematic storytelling that The Last of Us (whether you like it or not) has set as a gold standard. Based on Persian mythology, and made in Iran by a very small indie team, Mehran is clearly trying to be the middle eastern modern God of War/Assassin’s Creed; a noble endeavour. But good intentions aren’t always enough.
I honestly don’t know what the plot of the game is, its storytelling is so poor. Mehran is a retired warrior whose wife and daughter are murdered by the order of the corrupt King of the land. Why? I don’t know. The game opens with a recount of their culling, told through a cliche sequence where Mehran walks through the ruins of his homestead and the transparent ghosts of that night slowly manifest; the screen is filled with fire and alpha effects, the dying screams of his family echo through the night. The problem is that it’s unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 and all this grief causes the frame rate to tank to the low 20s.
He’s thrown in prison and then breaks out and this escape serves as your tutorial area, aka the thing that gets the player hooked. And it’s bad. Character models are, without any hyperbole, early PS3 quality, bug eyed with smooth skin and awkward movement. Mehran sprints like a constipated caveman and when you move around in a circle, his feet just glide along the floor like an Oblivion character. Lip synching is seemingly non-existent, almost as if they were ashamed to time it with the wooden voice acting, the worst performance being Mehran himself. We have a game where our main character looks, moves and sounds terrible. Off to a great start.
Then you get to the combat. It’s 2018 God of War but rubbish. Throw any criticism you want at the direction GoW has gone in and the modern “cinematic” style of gameplay, but you can’t deny the effort that’s gone into the animation, sound design and responsiveness in those titles. You’d probably appreciate it more if you played this. Fast attack, strong attack, parry and dodge, press the two sticks to go into Rage Mode, you know the bloody drill. But imagine that running at like 23fps with input lag, missing/cut off sound effects and wooden animation, topped off with a nauseating motion blur effect that can’t be turned off because the toggle in the options is broken. It’s like if someone made a NINTENDO HIRE THIS MAN tech demo into a game.
Okay I’ll play devil’s advocate for a bit, I have a few nice things to say. When not in motion and at a distance, environments can look kinda nice. Textures can be somewhat decent and it seems to have some kind of Ray Traced/Lumen reflection system (probably explains why the frame rate can barely reach 30). It also has a pretty sick opening cinematic that looks nothing like the actual game, which they proudly display on their store page to lure in the Assassin’s Creed audience. Lastly, the music can be nice sometimes, mainly when it’s emulating a classical Persian sound and not when it goes techno for some reason.
I do not recommend buying Blood of Mehran. They’re asking £21 for this; you can get a modern Assassin’s Creed or Dad of Boy for cheaper than that. I could barely stomach 2 hours and in that time I learned all I needed to know. It’s not even bad in way that’s entertaining or campy, it’s just mediocre at its core, kinda nostalgic in a weird way, like a clumsy PS2 game that’s been given a fan made texture mod. Both the gameplay and storytelling are beyond archaic and it has no place to stand in an industry with increasingly high standards. Sat next to me when I was playing it, my flatmate said it “looks like a mobile game from 2011”. And he’s right.
