Blood of Mehran review for PC, PS5, Xbox series X

It’s important to go into Blood of Mehran with the appropriate expectations.

If you go into it expecting a great game, you’ll be sorely disappointed. For that matter, if you go into Blood of Mehran expecting a good game, you’ll be disappointed. Its flaws are many and obvious.

That said, on the flip side, if you go in expecting a terrible game – say, one of the worst games of the year – then you may be pleasantly surprised. For all its flaws, it’s actually kind of fun.

To be sure, enjoying Blood of Mehran requires being willing to overlook quite a few issues. You need to have a high tolerance for poor performance, for one thing: while the game mostly runs alright, every so often I found it slowed to a crawl, usually just as you emerge from cutscenes and it takes awhile for everything to fully render.

Likewise, the graphics are all over the place. Sometimes the game looks absolutely gorgeous, and you can see the love and care that went into recreating an ancient Middle Eastern world, while others the game looks like it came out about 15-20 years ago, with characters and environments that look caught between PS2- and PS3-era graphics.

On top of that, you need to be okay with a game that’s incredibly linear. As much as I like games that don’t try to be sprawling epics set in massive open worlds, Blood of Mehran is almost the exact opposite: any time you can’t figure out where to go next, just look around for a wall or a ladder with yellow paint splashed all over it and you’ll have your answer.

And yet, even with its flaws, I actually found myself enjoying Blood of Mehran pretty consistently. As someone who got back into gaming during that post-God of War trilogy period where there was no shortage of hack-and-slash action games, something about it hits just the right nostalgia buttons for me. The combat will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever played any of those games, but that’s kind of a selling point for me: it’s nice to go back to a pre-Soulslike world, where you don’t need to figure out parrying or timing, and you can just run roughshod through enemies.

Does that make Blood of Mehran a good game? Again, definitely not. And you need to have a fondness for a very specific era of PS3 gaming to fully enjoy it. But I’ve definitely played significantly worse games than this – and considering Blood of Mehran’s reputation, that’s better than I was expecting going in.

Blowfish Studios provided us with a Blood of Mehran PC code for review purposes.