Normally, I like to lead into my reviews with a bit of history, a little cultural background, something to help steer the tone of the review. And for the life of me, I find myself unable to do so with Blood of Mehran. One might wonder what the problem is. And the solution is painfully obvious: the game itself is the problem.
Blood of Mehran is advertised as being inspired by The Arabian Nights, and it might be possibly the worst instance of false advertising I’ve come across in a while. The only reference I’ve been able to find is a secondary character with a badly written romantic angle. Granted, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve gone through The Arabian Nights, but I can’t remember any of the stories being about blood-soaked revenge and surly protagonists carving a swath of destruction across an empire. If the game was inspired by one of the stories in that august collection, it’s likely a deeply obscure one which doesn’t appear in most translations since Richard Burton’s.
From a visual perspective, Blood of Mehran certain looks good. Using the Unreal Engine, we certainly get the feel of the Middle East in terms of environments and character apparel. The UI is simple and uncluttered. Text for various descriptions of weapons, characters, and tutorials is clean and easy to read. Lighting and effects are well utilized to give weight to the environments and characters. That said, there seems to be some issues with character animations and parry/dodge indicators. In several instances, the indicators come after the attack animations begin, putting the player off-tempo and leading to a lot of unnecessary hits by enemies. Additionally, the cues for pulling a stealth kill are sometimes out of sync as well, requiring the player to inch forward a tiny little bit at a time until the prompt shows up and stays up long enough to actually push the button. Cutscenes are rendered in-engine and look good on the technical side of things, but don’t quite nail the cinematic side as well as they needed.
Audio in Blood of Mehran has its good and bad points. On the positive side, the music is definitely right for the setting. The instruments and orchestration fits each section nicely, not quite reaching the point of “play the OST outside the game,” but still very solid. Sound effects are good, not spectacular, but they get the job done. Voice acting is probably the big stumbling point here. The quality of the recordings is clear and the voices are understandable. But the quality of the direction and performance is shaky. It’s not just the barks from the main character or the endless mooks, even the cutscenes seem to suffer from inconsistent quality of performance. As a result, we get characters which aren’t quite compelling, and that’s really a problem.
To be completely frank, Blood of Mehran is possibly the laziest clone of Ghost of Tsushima that you could ever run across. It shamelessly lifts the mechanic of filling dots with parries and enemy kills (“chi” in Ghost of Tsushima, “chakra” here), then using them to heal or execute certain special abilities. You have boss battles with long bars and guards which have to be worn down. You have collectibles (of a sort), and you have different weapons you can pick up as you progress which are more effective for different sorts of enemies. Hell, it even stole the “yellow marking” for climbing points which has appeared in countless other games by this point. The problem is all the other stuff which either gets hideously fumbled or was never there to begin with. Blood of Mehran is essentially one long corridor. There are some side paths you can take, but you can’t backtrack if you accidentally go too far on the main path. There’s no open world, nothing to really explore, just you moving down the cattle chute. And periodically, there’s spots in the chute where the door’s closed till you clear out the mobs of enemies in some utterly tedious fashion or figure out whatever idiotic “puzzle” the developers thought would be a good idea. Good puzzle and level design is organic and seamless, and you will not find anything like that here.
Story elements and upgrades are often hidden behind the short side corridors (if you can find them), but you have no control over Mehran’s look as he finds new armor pieces or upgrades his weapons. You have horse riding sections which just move you down the chute faster than walking or running would (which feels particularly insulting, given the history of horses in the region). Stealth mechanics are a complete shambles given how finicky the “execute” prompt seems to be. Using a bow even with the aim assist turned on is slow and cumbersome. We don’t get any really good sense of the time period or locale (pre-Islamic Persia is about the closest I could guess, which covers a pretty large stretch of time), and we’ve got no good way to get immersed further in the setting. Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but being a bad imitation is itself deeply insincere.
Narratively, Blood of Mehran feels more like Gladiator than anything else, and it doesn’t seem to make even that convincing. Somebody might try to defend the weak storytelling by pointing out that the level designs are “focused” the way they are. But a linear game like this which has absolutely no narrative buy-in is a travesty. Honestly, starting the story as they chose to did them no favors. We don’t see “tortured man driven by grief”. We don’t get “John Wick with a sword”. We get a crappy tutorial which undermines the whole plot. There’s no real chemistry between Mehran and pretty much any character that isn’t a goon waiting in line to get chopped up (and there aren’t many of those sorts of characters at all). “Memory” interludes where Mehran and his wife are talking (before her brutal murder) completely fail to deliver any sort of feeling of romance or affection. Even the playable sequence which shows us the actual inciting incident doesn’t manage to wring any sort of feeling out of us. If the intent was to deliver an emotional gutpunch like Mad Max or The Last of Us, the effort failed spectacularly.
I really wanted to like Blood of Mehran. Had Permanent Way Games not invoked The Arabian Nights and given us a game set during the Achamenid, Parthian, or Sassanid Empires, and given it the same sort of open world love Sucker Punch gave to Ghost of Tsushima, I might have been a happier gamer. Instead, we get a bastardized version of a much better game which can’t deliver a decent moment if its life depended on it. I hate to say it, but the horse does not sing here.
Axel reviewed Blood of Mehran on PlayStation 5 with a provided review copy.
